Bad Behaviour

by Rebecca Starford

  Swallowing the last of my vodka raspberry, I’d stormed out with the parting threat of driving home. I crossed the road, looking back to see if she was watching. She wasn’t, but that didn’t stop me getting in the car. I could feel my phone vibrating in my handbag, but I wasn’t going to answer it. She couldn’t tell me what to do.

  I drove past the bar, and took the corner. That would show her, I thought with a smile. That would show her I was in control. Then I saw the red and blue lights in the rear-view mirror, and my heart started banging.

  Flicking on the indicator, I glanced at the back seat, hoping I might somehow find someone there. But I was entirely alone.

  Mr Hillman’s daughter Libby is back this afternoon. I find her loitering on the deck, red icy-pole smeared around her mouth. She has been visiting the house more regularly, as though lured by some dark power. When I begin rubbing sealant into my hiking boots out on the deck, she trots over to watch, leaning her warm torso against my back. She smells of crayons.

  ‘Go home,’ Sarah snaps from the drive. ‘You’re not allowed up here. We’ll get in trouble.’

  But Libby doesn’t listen. She climbs on top of the barred-metal washing crate. It’s empty today—we’ve just had laundry.

  When Portia comes outside and spots Libby, I can almost see the cogs turning.

  ‘Do you like that crate, Libby?’ she asks.

  Libby nods emphatically. ‘It’s my favourite.’

  ‘Would you like to climb inside?’

  Portia hoists Libby into the air, at the same time tipping open the crate’s lid with her knee. Libby peers inside, hesitates. Her blue eyes flicker in my direction.

  ‘Maybe—’ I begin.

  But before I can say anything more Portia has placed her inside. ‘You have to crouch,’ says Portia, pushing on Libby’s dark head. ‘So you can fit. See?’

  Again Libby hesitates. Her mouth hangs open, her big bottom lip trembling. But I can’t tell if she is afraid when she squeals and drops to all fours. Portia slams the lid and snaps on the padlock. She looks at Sarah and they both fall about laughing, and I am laughing too because Libby has squished her face against the bars. Portia grabs her camera and takes a few snaps. ‘Kids are so weird,’ she sighs.

  Kendall appears in the doorway. ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she says.

  ‘What?’ Portia juts her chin.

  Kendall so rarely speaks out that we’ve all turned and stared.

  ‘Libby shouldn’t be in that crate.’

  ‘She likes it in there—look.’

  Libby clings to the wire. She is shaking all over, like a dog left out during a storm. I glance back at Kendall. She is watching me with her head cocked, and doubt begins unspooling deep in my stomach.

  I can’t stand her judging me—of all people, it seems worst coming from her. But then a voice comes floating up from the road, and leaning over the banister I see Miss Lacey heading towards the house with Mr Hillman.

  ‘Quick,’ Portia says. ‘Get that calico.’ She crouches beside the cage. ‘Hey, Libby, if you’re really quiet when I put this over your crate—and I mean silent as a mouse—we’ll have a surprise for you. You like surprises, don’t you? Do you like chocolate?’

  Libby sniffs, peering through her filthy fingers.

  I can hear Miss Lacey and Mr Hillman in the dorm. We have only a few seconds before they’ll walk through to the deck. If they catch us with Libby, I don’t know how we’ll ever talk our way out of this.

  Portia throws the calico over the crate. Libby flinches, banging her head against the metal lid.

  ‘Maybe we should just let her out?’ I croak.

  ‘She’s fine,’ says Sarah.

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Oh, make up your bloody mind, Bec,’ Portia snaps.

  We’re sitting along the length of the banister when they fill the doorway. Miss Lacey narrows her eyes; she knows us well enough to know we never loiter innocently on the deck like this.

  ‘Girls.’ Mr Hillman smiles. ‘Have you seen Libby about at all?’

  He is standing just a few paces from the washing crate.

  ‘No, I’m sorry,’ Portia says politely. ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she’s fine.’

  I say nothing, staring at Mr Hillman’s skinny legs. They’re covered in dark, fuzzy hair. He always wears stubbies, even in winter. A drip of sweat runs down my back.

  When they’ve gone, Portia throws back the calico. ‘That was close,’ she breathes.

  It takes some coaxing, but Libby eventually raises her head. She grips my outstretched hand, bringing one leg out, then the other, and then takes off, down the steps and along the road. She didn’t even want her reward.

  There’s a small puddle of pink liquid on the crate’s floor. ‘I think she’s thrown up,’ I say.

  Portia puts an arm around my shoulder and chuckles. ‘Kids are disgusting, aren’t they?’

  ~

  I can’t stop thinking about Libby and her frightened face pressed against the bars of the crate. I wish I had walked away, joined Kendall. Her judgment weighs uncomfortably, like she’s seen some private part of me that I never wanted to expose, and I avoid her around the house. But I watch Portia closely. I have a horrible feeling she’s got something else planned.

  When I come back after class the next day, I immediately sense something has happened. I don’t know what it is, but girls are dotted around the dorm, their faces taut. I find Briohny near the fireplace. Ronnie stands beside her, chewing at her nails.

  I dump my books on my desk. ‘What’s going on?’

  Ronnie looks at Briohny, who nods. ‘Drying room,’ Ronnie breathes. ‘Go and see it for yourself.’

  The drying room is empty except for suitcases and storage crates. The door is already ajar. Suitcases are stacked around the small room. The heat is on and the room pongs, condensation at the glass near the roof. There’s a large blue suitcase in the middle, with a yellow nametag bright against the tiles. Kendall.

  Ronnie comes to the doorway, her silhouette long across the floor. I take a step further into the room and sink to my knees. I reach out, fearful of this object, and run my hand over the cracked leather casing. It is cold, despite the warmth of the room. Taking a deep breath, I flick the catch and raise the lid.

  In the middle of the suitcase, like an ancient offering, is a giant human turd. The room fills with a wet and meaty stench and I reel from it, gagging, and slam the lid shut. I scramble for the door, for the fresh air. Ronnie moves aside to let me past.

  ‘Who did this?’

  I follow her to the deck, but she won’t answer me—just shoves her hands in her pockets.

  ‘Ronnie, who did this?’

  ‘Sarah,’ she hisses. ‘It was Sarah, okay? Fuck.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  She shrugs. ‘Portia told her to do it.’

  I feel lightheaded. I dangle a hand against the banister, the first ripple of understanding breaking through me: how we’ll all be implicated in this, every last girl in Red House.

  ‘Does Kendall know?’

  Ronnie leans out, surveying the road. In the fading afternoon light she doesn’t look beautiful anymore, only washed out, bloodshot. ‘Not yet,’ she says.

  ~

  I don’t bother searching for Sarah. She’ll be up in the bush, perched on an overturned log, smoking. It’s Portia I want.

  I find her on the edge of her bed, flicking through a magazine. ‘Before you say anything, it wasn’t me,’ she yawns. ‘It was Sarah.’

  ‘But you told her to do it.’

  Portia looks up, frowns. She’s wearing a cap and her hair sticks out like straw. ‘Can’t change what’s happened now.’

  ‘Do you know how much trouble you’ll be in?’

  ‘Me?’ she says. ‘Are you deaf? It was Sarah.’

  When she turns to a new page I snatch the magazine away. ‘What is wrong with you?’

  She’s on her feet in a flash, shovin
g me in the chest. I lose my balance, dropping the magazine.

  ‘Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?’ she growls. ‘Sarah did a shit in the suitcase, not me. It was a joke, a dare. I never thought she’d actually do it.’

  She picks up the magazine, rolls it up like a baton and begins slapping it against her leg. Slap, slap, slap. I watch her, transfixed, my resolve disappearing like the air from a punctured balloon.

  ‘What has Kendall ever done to you?’

  Portia’s brow creases. She peers down, into her lap, where she’s tightened her grip on the rolled-up magazine. Then she looks me straight in the eye. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ~

  News of the ‘shit in the suitcase’ spreads around the school like wildfire. As Red House files into the dining hall, someone sneers, ‘Feral bitches,’ and when lunch is served a roll is chucked at our table, clattering onto Emma’s plate. None of the teachers do anything about it. I wonder where Miss Lacey has gone.

  ‘Everyone knows,’ I groan. ‘The whole bloody school. We’ll never live this down.’

  ‘What are you so worried about?’ Briohny says. ‘You didn’t do it.’

  Finally Miss Lacey appears. Her face is paler than usual, but her throat is covered in a rash, which seems to be spreading from her chest. Sarah, she tells us, has been expelled. ‘She’s up at the house now, packing her things.’

  Miss Lacey toys with a fork at the end of the table, her face unreadable now.

  ‘You’re not to go up there, girls,’ she says through gritted teeth. ‘You’re to stay away from the house.’

  I expect a protest but no one says anything. Don’t they care? Despite what’s happened, I hate to think of Sarah up there on her own, so when the meal ends I slip out of the dining hall and run back up the hill.

  But when I walk back into the house I find the dorm empty. In the far corner Sarah’s bed has been stripped bare, the drawers hanging open.

  ‘Sarah?’

  She is gone. I slump against the empty cupboard, my feet sliding out from under me. The tiles are cold on my legs. I hang my head between my knees and let out a strangled sob.

  When I hear a sound of boots across the floor, I look up to find Kendall standing in the doorway. She takes a few steps inside, walking around in a small circle. Her face hangs sadly.

  ‘I had to,’ she says. ‘I know everyone will hate me more for it, but . . .’ She worries at her crimson bottom lip. ‘It was just too much.’

  I get to my feet. I feel woozy, my own sweat sour in my nostrils. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘Everyone knows it. And . . .’ I swallow. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She tries to smile but her lip just trembles. She seems so much older, prematurely aged, and I think: We did that.

  ~

  Emma and I sit on the balcony. It is cold tonight. We should be in bed but the assistants have left us alone. Everything is different now that Sarah is gone. Briohny, who had slept next to her, has already repositioned her bed to give herself twice the room, her mattress now facing out over the dorm like a throne.

  ‘You didn’t wait long,’ I’d muttered from across the aisle.

  Briohny only laughed. ‘Just making the best of a bad situation.’

  Down the hill, Yellow House’s lights flash through the dorm and a burst of shrill laughter travels across the dark. The air smells of fire, of burnt wood, of ashes.

  ‘Maybe things will be better now,’ I murmur.

  Emma says nothing, leaning over to pick at a scab on her knee. It’s a big scab, covering most of the kneecap, and I watch until the sensor light goes out. But we don’t move. We just go on sitting there, the moonlight drifting in and out of the clouds, sliding through the night like a blade.

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  PART FOUR

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  ..............................................

  I get into Cattlemans Flat just as the cold starts to seep up from the ground, pulling into an empty spot about thirty metres from the river. The rush of fresh water, the overturned gum in the middle of the campsite, the pit toilet discreetly nestled behind a few trees—it’s all the same.

  Other campers are scattered around the grassy site, some of them listening to the second half of the football on the radio. The couple across the road wave; they have an enormous fluffy white dog sitting at their feet.

  Before setting up, I head down to the river, which is high after the recent rain. Light threads through the trees. Perched on a rock, I watch the fast-moving current. The water is brown and black and jade, and all around the bank are rocks, some white and bare, others jagged and grey, covered in moss. A leaf flutters to the sleek surface and is whisked along the rapids until it disappears around the bend. Near the bridge a large branch, trapped under the stones, protrudes from the water, shuddering in the passing current.

  I wonder what Mary would make of my visit to Silver Creek. A few months after I was caught drink-driving, I decided to make an appointment with a counsellor. I wasn’t coping; I felt like I had fallen into a bad place and I couldn’t find my way out. I wasn’t sleeping, and I wasn’t eating properly, either. I would sit down to a meal, almost delirious with hunger, only for the food to make my stomach turn. I would have to force it down, fighting the urge to retch. I’d lost fifteen kilograms in three months.

  More than this, I was worried about how the conviction hadn’t changed that much about my behaviour. I was still going out several times a week, drinking heavily—so much, in fact, that in the morning I couldn’t remember huge parts of the night before. I was becoming forgetful at work, making mistakes; sometimes I couldn’t drag myself out of bed at all and called in sick instead. I needed a circuit breaker.

  Mary practised from home, quite near to me. Her consultation room, at the front of her house, was a pleasant one, ideal for talking, with a large mahogany shelf filled with books, the kind you’d expect to see in such rooms—a battered copy of The Second Sex, a Companion to Australian Literature, lots on Freud.

  Mary was not a counsellor, I discovered during our first session, but a psychotherapist. ‘Lacanian,’ she said, glancing towards the reclining couch in the corner.

  When she asked why I had come to see her, I sat fidgeting in the chair. ‘Well,’ I said, clearing my throat, ‘I guess it’s because I’m unhappy.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About . . . a range of things, really. I was caught drink-driving. And I broke up with someone recently. A girl, I mean. Alexis. It wasn’t an easy relationship. She wanted us to be non-monogamous, actually, which I didn’t really want . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ said Mary.

  I swallowed thickly. ‘And then, I suppose, it’s other things too. Which are linked to the relationship. Or maybe not. I don’t know.’

  I’d begun to cry and Mary handed me a box of tissues, ones scented with eucalyptus. I took a few gratefully.

  ‘What other things?’ she asked.

  I pushed the back of my head into the chair. My scalp was aching from my tight bun. Far away I could hear crying. A baby, it sounded like, in one of the houses on the narrow street, or perhaps a cat.

  ‘I’ve fallen out with a few close friends,’ I said. ‘Girls I thought I’d be friends with always. It’s been . . . hurtful. I don’t know why it has happened.’

  I could have been talking about any of my old friends, but I was thinking about Ruby. After Alexis moved out I had grown to despise the townhouse: the tinny hammer of rain on the roof, how it shuddered in the wind. Whenever I woke in the middle of the night I still found myself listening for the sound of Alexis’s key in the lock.

 
Her bedroom sat empty, a thin layer of dust coating the floor. We needed a new housemate, to fill the space and cover the rent. But I didn’t want anyone else in there.

  Ruby always seemed bewildered by my grief. She may not have liked Alexis, but I still wanted her to comfort me: to take me out for a meal or a glass of wine. I wanted to talk to her about Alexis—and apologise and begin to make amends. But we never spoke of it; our friendship had frayed so much that only a few threads were holding it together.

  I started looking at other share houses. After a couple of weeks of interviews, I was invited to move into a terrace in North Fitzroy. All I needed to do was tell Ruby.

  By then we were barely talking. But it was more than that—something had hardened in me. If she didn’t care for me, why should I be bothered with her? As the days stretched on, I could feel myself retreating further from the announcement.

  The week before I was due to move out, when I knew Ruby would be at work, I began to pack up. I didn’t have many things—Alexis had taken most of the shared furniture with her.

  Ruby came home that evening. As she glanced at the piles outside my bedroom I finally confessed that I was moving out.

  Ruby chewed at the edge of her lip. ‘When?’

  ‘This weekend. But don’t worry! I’ll pay up the full month of rent.’

  ‘You’re leaving this weekend and you’re only telling me now?’

  I took a step back. Ruby never raised her voice, and her face was puckered with rage.

  ‘You haven’t been around,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t been anywhere!’

  Only then did it occur to me that she might care about me leaving. But I didn’t have the chance to say anything else because she had already stormed into her bedroom and slammed the door. She left again a few minutes later, taking an overnight bag.

  Lying there on Mary’s couch I had swiped a tear from the corner of my eye. I missed Ruby. I hadn’t seen her since I’d moved out months ago. Sometimes my imagination strayed to a scene where I ran into her, which was always unsettling. Not because I was afraid of what she might do or say—I liked to think she would be friendly and polite—but I knew, just knew, that I’d turn and walk in the other direction, avoiding the confrontation.