Bad Behaviour

by Rebecca Starford

  ‘Was that true, then?’ I ask, throwing dirt on the smouldering coals. ‘The story your grandfather told. Did you believe him?’

  Portia just shrugs. ‘Why wouldn’t I believe him?’ she says.

  ~

  The next day is cooler as the sun lingers behind the clouds. We follow the trail along the creek before it veers deeper into the forest. It’s dense and lush in here, the path overgrown in parts. There are ferns everywhere—some as tall as people. Portia picks blackberries from a ravine and rubs the fruit all over her face, staining it purple. We can’t stop laughing, which makes her laugh too, until she can hardly breathe. I take a photo.

  After a couple of hours, Portia suggests we run the rest of the way. ‘We can get back to school sooner,’ she reasons. ‘Be the first girls in.’

  I glance at Ronnie. I don’t want to run. I’ve got a stomach ache; I need to go to the toilet, I’ve needed to for ages, but I don’t want to take the trowel so the others know I’m doing a poo.

  ‘Bec?’ Portia says, in a voice that suggests it is my decision.

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Let’s do it.’

  It’s a painful two hours. We jog on and off, our packs bouncing, our legs buckling whenever the path dips. My stomach grows tight like the skin of a barrel. I start to feel a bit sick, and have to stop once or twice, wincing as I lean against a tree.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Ronnie asks.

  ‘Almost home,’ Portia calls from the front. And we are—we hit the school drive twenty minutes later and are the first girls’ group to sign back in. It feels good, being the first back. Being the fastest. The best.

  ‘See?’ Portia says as we walk back up to the house. ‘I told you running was a good idea, didn’t I?’

  She stops on the track outside the chapel, her eyebrows raised. When I nod, she smiles again, but before I can say anything she has turned her back on me, continuing up the hill.

  ~

  I wait until everyone else has showered before using the toilet. Then I have a long shower. Nothing, I think as I wash my hair and scrub at my arms and legs, has ever felt so good. Through the bathroom windows I hear other girls returning, someone stomping out into the boiler room to jam a few logs into the fire.

  Wrapped in a towel, I wander back out to the dorm. There are a few more girls sprawled across their beds, still dressed in their filthy hiking gear. As I head towards my bed, I catch sight of Portia from the corner of my eye, prancing up and down the aisle naked.

  I wait for others to laugh. But the dorm is silent. I scuttle to my bed, trying not to look at her white bum and breasts. She brings out a giant tub of talcum powder, begins tapping it against her underarms and pubic hair, then spreads herself across the bed like a model posing for a portrait, gazing around the dorm as if daring us to speak.

  No one does, of course. I’m shocked at her brazenness—I usually get changed in the bathroom, or the toilet cubicles. Now I scramble to dress myself, towel caught under my arms, tugging on my pants and my crop top.

  As I do, Ronnie stops at the foot of my bed. ‘Your back is a bit spotty, dear,’ she announces.

  Now girls laugh. I hunch over, staring at the floor. Why did she say that? The spots come and go like a rash. I wanted to see the doctor about it but Mum would only buy me antiseptic wipes, and I feel a sudden jab of hatred towards her.

  ~

  The next morning Portia draws me aside after breakfast. She wants to put up a clothesline out the back of the house. ‘We’ll do it together,’ she says. ‘Our own private project.’

  Ronnie and Briohny have turned around, watching us fall back behind the group. That warm excitement returns, bubbling away in my stomach. How thrilling to be chosen by her, out of all the others.

  ‘I’d love that,’ I say.

  She squeezes my arm. ‘Awesome.’

  We set to work that afternoon, clearing the bracken beneath the trees. We find a few planks of wood and some tough string, and it doesn’t take long for her to fashion a working line. She doesn’t really need me in the end, so while she hammers the nails into the trunk, I plant some grass seeds out the front of the house. The earth is hard and dry, but I toil until I’ve shaped a small channel, giving the earth a drink from the hose.

  Portia reminds me of Serena, a girl I knew in my first year of primary school. They have the same dark hair, same freckles and colouring, except where Portia’s eyes are sharp and narrow, Serena’s were round and crinkly. Serena had been in grade six, and during the first weeks of term she was also my reading buddy. Every Wednesday I would meet her in the assembly room and read with her for an hour. I adored Serena. I wanted her to come home and live with me so we could go down to the beach every day and kick the football to one another.

  That was until the afternoon she told me she couldn’t be my buddy anymore because the program had finished, and I had curled my small fingers into a fist and belted her square on her back. I remember the sound so distinctly—a hollow thump—and her look of utter surprise. Not anger, or pain. I was sent back to my classroom, where the teacher made me stand in the corner. When Mum came to collect me, she wiped the hair from my brow and asked, ‘Now why did you do that?’

  After the gardening, Portia and I take a break out on the deck, sucking at our water bottles. The single cloud in the sky drifts across the sun. The dorm will be hot now, and stuffy. ‘Can’t believe we still don’t have curtains,’ Portia mutters.

  I gaze down at Yellow House, shrouded in darkness. Most nights our dorm is awash with moonlight. There is little privacy, either—from the road you can see us getting changed if we stand too close to the windows.

  ‘We’ll get them,’ I say.

  Portia stares at me evenly, and shrugs.

  But we never do. Day after day we complain, but Miss Lacey never does anything about it. I don’t understand why she doesn’t listen to us. Doesn’t she care? Then one day she visits the house with sleeping masks, the kind you get on long-haul flights.

  ‘Here you go,’ she says, beaming as she hands them out. ‘This should help at night.’

  ‘This is instead of curtains?’ I blurt out. ‘Are you taking the piss?’

  Her face grows dark. ‘I won’t be spoken to like that, Rebecca,’ she says, and later I see she has marked me down for a detention—just like that.

  ‘It’s like Animal Farm here,’ I grumble to Emma before lights-out. We’ve started reading it in English.

  She looks up from her Smash Hits magazine and smiles. ‘Only you would say that.’

  ~

  Emma and I begin a photography elective. We learn how to develop black-and-white photos in a darkroom, and one afternoon we head out past the dam into the denser bush. I’ve got it in my head that I’ll take wildlife photos, like David Attenborough, of butterflies and lizards and wallabies. But there aren’t any animals around.

  When we find a big tree with rope hanging from it, Emma sets up the camera on the tripod and takes snaps of me soaring across the canopy. ‘Work it, work it,’ she shouts in a silly British accent, which makes me laugh.

  At dinner, I watch Emma with real fondness. She is kind to me in a way no one else in the house is—always complimenting me on my prep and telling me I am clever. I’ve never had a friend like that. She makes me feel good about myself. She doesn’t seem to care whether other people like her or not; she doesn’t try to talk to the country boys, and isn’t interested in how long you’ve been at the school, or where you live. Emma lives in Mildura and she went to the local high school. She often talks about home, her brothers and sisters, and all her friends—she seems to have hundreds of them.

  But some Red House girls don’t like Emma. They call her a bogan because of her nasally voice. Emma doesn’t mind. ‘You’re all a bunch of snobs,’ she says good-naturedly. She always tells things like they are. I envy that about her, too. She doesn’t want to be friends with Portia or Ronnie: ‘They’re just not nice girls,’ she said to me once. I started to worry after that. If she d
oesn’t like them, what does she like about me? If you strip me down, am I a not-nice girl too?

  ~

  Another week goes by with no mail from my parents. It’s been three weeks now, with no letters from home. I’ve written twice to Mum and Dad, telling them about the runs and the hikes. Why haven’t they written back? Again I wonder if they’ve forgotten about me. It seems a ridiculous thought at first, but as the days stretch on, I begin to panic. Maybe they’re happier without me.

  One mail day I wait in the study with the girls as a young, plump Scottish assistant called Miss McKinney divvies out the post. ‘Nothing for you, Starford,’ she chuckles. ‘Your parents enjoying themselves too much to write?’

  It’s only a joke but the words burn. ‘Fat fuck,’ I hiss after her, shocked at the venom in my voice. I turn and see Lou watching me from her desk, eyes wide.

  Later that night, when everyone’s in bed reading, I stay in the bathroom. I brush my teeth slowly, my feet growing cold on the tiles. Eventually I lock myself in a cubicle, where I stifle sobs with my T-shirt. Crying exhausts me, and I feel an odd weight of sadness, as though I’m both very old and very young.

  Each night after dinner Lou and I climb on the roof to watch the sunset. ‘My favourite part of the day,’ says Lou, smiling at the shock of orange and pink across the sky. I think Lou misses home more than anyone. She always talks about it in a wistful way. Her parents are sheep farmers and they live on a property called The Plains, with cats and dogs and horses; she even has a pet lamb, named Molly.

  Lou brings along letters to read. Mum has finally sent me two letters, which I keep in a box on my bedside table. There wasn’t much to them—Mum wrote about how Archie bowled at cricket, and what video she and Dad watched on Saturday night. She didn’t say why it had taken so long to write.

  Up on the roof I can almost believe that the rest of the world has forgotten us. That we’ve slipped through some crack in time. Memories of home are fading and in their place have seeped the faces and voices and gestures of the girls, growing so familiar I know them better than my own.

  But tonight, instead of heading to the roof after dinner, Lou and I set up a tent on top of Dusty Hill. It’s Red House’s turn for Fire Watch.

  Lou and I take first shift, scanning the blue-black distance and making notes in the logbook. Bushfires are a real danger this time of year. Being out here makes me think about my parents. The year before I was born they lost everything in the Ash Wednesday fires. Their house was destroyed, along with Mum’s car and most of their possessions.

  ‘Even your clothes?’ I once asked.

  Mum looked away, at her cuticles. She doesn’t like to talk about it.

  ‘We had nothing,’ she said at last. ‘We went to work that morning and by evening everything was gone.’

  I used to wonder how they managed to start again. To buy a new car to get to work, or buy appliances to cook dinner—all those things you need to exist. But now I’m at Silver Creek I realise you don’t really need a lot of stuff in your life. I don’t miss the comforts of home either—not television or Nintendo or the phone. I can cook all kinds of meals on a fire; I’ve washed myself in the river. You don’t need many clothes, either—I’ve been wearing the same pair of jeans for weeks. There is something liberating about not feeling reliant on all those possessions, about not feeling attached.

  We still get newspapers: each evening the Herald Sun and the Age are delivered to the house, where they lie in a stack next to the fireplace, gathering dust. No one ever wants to read them. What use is news of the outside world to us here?

  But one night, out of curiosity, Simone and I open the front page to a story about Saddam Hussein and his chemical attacks on Kurdish people. It seems tensions in that region have been simmering again for some time.

  Simone grows agitated, throwing the paper aside. ‘You know what this means?’ she says. ‘The end of the world.’

  Simone has always had a vivid imagination. Even so, I’m frightened. This is different from her other stories (like the white streak in her hair a result of being struck by lightning). This has secondary sources.

  Over beef stroganoff, we describe our impending doom to the rest of Red House. Cities will be obliterated, millions will die. Silver Creek, Simone reasons, should escape the fallout longer than the cities, and when Saddam comes after us we can retreat to the bush. ‘Just like Ellie in Tomorrow, When the War Began.’ In her excitement Simone’s post-war world becomes more and more fantastical: ‘We’ll live in the wombat burrows and survive on wild berries!’

  When Miss Lacey visits the house during prep, Simone waves the newspaper at her, inviting me to outline the survival strategy. Miss Lacey reads the article, looks at us, and laughs and laughs until the whole study stares. ‘I hate to disappoint you,’ she says, ‘but I don’t think we’re going to be invaded anytime soon. Still, it’s a great story.’

  Miss Lacey never takes us seriously. I reflect on this after she’s gone, frowning as I slump over my desk. She visits the house less than she used to, and when she does she’s always wary, searching our faces as if for some clue to a trick. It didn’t matter to her that I was actually afraid. ‘What if we were in real danger?’ I say to no one in particular. ‘Would she even believe us?’

  I find Portia watching. ‘Nah,’ she murmurs. ‘She doesn’t care about us.’

  ‘But it’s her job.’

  Portia shakes her head. ‘She’s no different from other teachers. Pretending to be nice but really not giving a shit.’ She stares at the tip of her sneakers, her eyes dark. ‘Maybe she needs a little test?’

  ~

  A bloodcurdling scream brings Miss Lacey charging into the dorm the following night.

  ‘What is it?’ she cries. ‘What’s the matter?’ Her torchlight bounces around the dark like a fly caught under glass.

  I sit up, doona pulled high to my chin, the story ready: I saw a man at the window. But before I can speak the light drops to the floor and Miss Lacey sighs. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘I see what’s going on here.’

  No one moves. No one says a word. Miss Lacey puts a hand on her hips, surveying the dorm. ‘What?’ she scoffs. ‘Cat got your tongues now?’

  ‘We saw a man,’ I say. ‘At the window. You . . .’

  ‘Oh, just be quiet, Rebecca.’

  She leans against the doorway and I can see she is dressed in a pretty blouse and jeans. Like she was going out, if there was anywhere to go up here.

  ‘Enough of these pranks,’ she says, steering the torchlight over each bed. ‘Do you understand?’ When she reaches me she pauses, and the light flares in my eyes. ‘If I hear another sound,’ she warns, ‘I’ll make sure you all sleep in tents for a week.’

  I yank the doona over my head as her footsteps retreat along the road. I lie like this, amid the fusty air, until it becomes hard to breathe, clenching at the pillow until my hands ache. Why doesn’t she believe me?

  ~

  I’m still sulking on the way to breakfast the next morning when Portia appears next to me. She’s got a story, she says, that will cheer me up. It’s about a secret ritual at Silver Creek called the Bell Run. You run to the chapel in the middle of the night, she explains, ring the outside bell as many times as you dare, then run back to your house. ‘And,’ she says, a wicked glint in her eye, ‘you have to do it nude.’

  I laugh, but as I do I feel the colour rise to my face. I wonder if the others know about the Bell Run. It seems an odd sort of ritual—running around the bush in the middle of the night with no clothes on. I don’t say it, of course, but I don’t fancy getting naked in front of anyone.

  A week later Portia again draws me aside. ‘I want to do it,’ she whispers. ‘Tonight. You up for it?’

  I hadn’t thought she was serious, and for a moment I’m peeved with her. But Portia and I have been getting along so well, I don’t want to spoil it now. I like being her friend; I like walking with her to breakfast, I like running with her on the crossi
es. I like the power I feel in her company; how the boys nod hello to me as I walk by. Most of all I like the way other girls look at me: with hesitation, with a bit of admiration. And with a bit of fear.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say.

  We’ll get in a lot of trouble if we’re caught—detentions, or worse: Stonely Roads, a five-kilometre run to the bottom of the school drive and back at dawn.

  ‘You scared?’ Portia teases. ‘Come on, it’ll be fun.’

  ‘Just the two of us?’ I say, glancing around the dorm.

  Portia shakes her head. ‘Sarah’s coming too. Actually,’ she says with a smile, ‘she suggested it.’

  I raise my eyebrows. Sarah is a quiet girl who sleeps in the bed next to Briohny. Hardly the first person I’d think would suggest a Bell Run. Sarah’s in my French class, though Ronnie doesn’t like her—‘Once a nerd, always a nerd,’ she whispered at the start of term. I didn’t know she and Portia were friends.

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘I’m up for it.’

  That night, after lights-out, when Miss McKinney has headed back down the slope towards Yellow House, I meet Portia and Sarah in the tog room.

  ‘So how do we do this, then?’ I ask, running my hands up and down my goose-pimpled arms.

  ‘I guess we just strip and sprint, yeah?’ says Portia. We start giggling.

  I edge my boxer shorts over my hips until they fall in a silky pile to the floor. Portia and Sarah both have their backs to me as they undress, Portia’s white bum virtually glowing in the dark.

  I hunch over as we make our way along to the road, absurdly trying to hide my breasts. Not that Sarah and Portia are looking—they’re both walking ahead, tall, like tribal leaders on their way to battle. It’s so quiet out here. The stars are sparkling like cut diamonds on a black cloth. I don’t know what we’ll do if someone comes across us. But there is no one around. The road is empty, the night is still, a crisp vacuum. The school is ours.

  At the path, Portia waves us towards some bushes. Her arm brushes against mine and it feels like a current of electricity along my skin. I’ve never been so close to another naked girl. I try not to look at either of them, fixing my eyes to the ground. But when the moon drifts out from behind the clouds I have a full view of Sarah’s brown, fleshy breasts and the mass of dark hair between her legs. She’s like a full-grown woman, and I frown down at my own flat chest.