Bad Behaviour

by Rebecca Starford

  ‘No! No! No! I’ve ruined my Final, I might as well ruin the marathon too.’ She’s writhing around in the long grass. ‘I’ve ruined everything,’ she wails. ‘The whole year—and this is how I will remember it. I hate it—I hate it all. I hate the house, I hate being punished all the time. And I fucking hate myself!’

  I peer over the ditch. I can’t see Miss Constantine. ‘Please,’ I say, climbing to my feet. ‘Let me help you. Before she gets back. We can’t let her beat us. Come on, take my hand.’

  Briohny blinks at me, a smudge of dirt on her nose. She looks so wretched, and I feel a pang of sorrow for her as she reaches out, the first look of gratitude I’ve ever seen shift across her face.

  ~

  Outside the library Miss Constantine leans against the bonnet of the Jeep. She taps her watch. ‘Oh dear, girls,’ she calls. ‘Seven minutes over.’

  As I hear these words my legs give out beneath me and I slump to my knees, barely aware of the sharp stones. What is she going to do to us?

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, will you just leave them alone?’

  My eyes fly open. Miss Lacey storms down the steps, pointing at Miss Constantine. She touches my shoulder on her way past, but it is Briohny she wants; Briohny, whose grey, unfriendly eyes are glazed with abject fury.

  But before Miss Lacey can say anything, Briohny has turned her back. ‘I’m fine,’ she says, and begins sloshing up the steps, her tread grim but also possessing a calm resignation. Miss Lacey watches after her, rubbing at her forehead, then turns to me, eyebrows raised, as though I might have some kind of answer. But I’m staring at Briohny’s liquid footsteps already disappearing in the afternoon heat.

  ~

  I wake the next morning with pain shredding my head. My legs feel bruised and a blister swells on my big toe. I bandage it up, and gulp down a few Panadeine Forte before staggering down to breakfast. By 8 am the whole school has gathered in the car park for the start of the marathon.

  Whenever I used to imagine the marathon—in the years before I came to Silver Creek—I had always pictured triumph. Not victory, but a sense of achievement, of validation. The year’s hard work—all that sweat and tears and pain rolled into one race.

  But pressed between two girls in the line-up, wearing my bike shorts and white T-shirt, I feel no excitement, no anticipation or pride, and that emptiness makes me want to weep. I had been looking forward to this moment for so long, but after yesterday’s Stonely Road my feet are like bricks and my back is stiff and knotted. How am I going to race thirty-two kilometres like this? I glance around at the other girls—all fresh-faced, stretching in the shade, and drawing great mouthfuls of water from aluminium bottles—and my shoulders slump. That small reserve of energy I had tucked away for today, those final drips of juice, is gone.

  After the gun goes off, I find myself somewhere near the front, though girls and boys soon run past me—hundreds, it seems, until I’m sure I’m in last place. I can’t move easily; everything feels tight, clunky, and I have no will to push through it.

  It takes me nearly five hours. I run for most of it, stopping to walk when my side burns with a stitch, or when I feel burpy after the drinks stop. On and on the race goes, until I’m sure I’ll never finish, sure my body will give up on me and I’ll need to be helicoptered out of here.

  When I finally reach the last leg, along School Road and around the bend, I see that most of Red House is already back, lining the embankment—even Emma has somehow beat me. I’m crying as I cross the finish line, and she rushes over to hug me. ‘Well done,’ she says.

  ‘It’s not well done,’ I wail. ‘It was . . . shit.’

  But Emma laughs. ‘You just finished the marathon, you dickhead. It’s brilliant. Come on, let’s cheer the others.’

  So we sit there on the sweltering rocks, shouting down the slope. Many kids glance up the hill, startled at our hoarse cries—most of them I’ve never muttered a word to the whole year.

  Then Kendall trundles around the corner, her long white hair tied back in a plait. She is breathing hard, forcing out the air, face strained like she’s constipated. Emma and I get to our feet, cup our hands around our mouths and holler, ‘Go, Kendall, you’re almost home!’

  A flicker moves across her contorted face. Her eyes stay focused, nailed to the finish line, and as she lurches forward, taking those final paces, she turns and raises a hand to us before falling to the ground.

  ~

  I’m standing on the deck overlooking the road. Behind me Kendall rummages in her enormous case, the one Sarah pooed in. We’re the last Red House girls up here. Everyone else has gone.

  Lou was the first. She left before breakfast so she could make her flight to Canada where her family is skiing over Christmas. Emma left soon after, her mum waiting in the station wagon at the bottom of the hill. ‘Will I see you again?’ she sobbed, clinging to me. I keep forgetting she won’t be at the Big School next year with the rest of us, that she’s going back to Mildura forever. All this time I thought she would change her mind.

  ‘Yeah, ’course,’ I said, my own voice bloodless. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like, not seeing her every day. ‘And we’ll talk on the phone heaps.’

  She wiped her eyes, smiling. ‘I forgot about phones,’ she said.

  On the other side of the dorm, Ronnie and Briohny and a couple of other girls had formed a circle around Portia. They were all talking loudly, drowning out the rest of the noise in the dorm, and I gave them a small, spiteful look as I crouched in front of my drawers to finish the last of my packing. All I could hear was laughter, and Portia’s shrill insistence that they hang out over the holidays, at parties in the city and at the invite-only tennis tournament at a beach somewhere. Portia had invited me to the same event, even suggesting we partner up for doubles; I snorted at the memory of it. She glanced across the beds to me, raising a dark eyebrow. I gazed back at her, my face set, musing on how I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, picture her on her own, without her girls, outside this dorm. She was shapeless, like a sea mist. And while I felt like she knew a lot about me—how to hurt me, how to lure me back—I really knew nothing about her at all.

  I wonder now, standing on the deck, if she ever thought about her behaviour and how it made us all feel. What was it about Kendall that made Portia target her so relentlessly? And would she be like this next year, at the senior school? This thought sends a shiver down my spine.

  I lean against the banister and peer over the unmoving campus. The others all left on the Melbourne buses. Most of the teachers have gone too—to their own families, or on holiday somewhere. I can’t imagine Miss Lacey out there in the real world either, on a crowded city street, or lying on a beach. I wonder what Libby is doing for the holidays. I’d hoped to see her before I left, but that now seems unlikely.

  Kendall joins me by the banister. Not too close, but it feels companionable. She rests her chin against her knuckles, sighing as she stares over the trees. ‘Can’t believe it’s over,’ she says.

  I make a sound like a grunt. I feel shy out here with her.

  ‘What have you got planned for the holidays?’ she asks.

  ‘Dunno,’ I say. ‘Go to the beach, maybe.’

  She smiles. ‘Sounds nice. I’ll probably just catch up with some friends, then hang out at home, doing nothing.’

  I look at her dumbly. I suppose she does have friends outside of school. Why wouldn’t she? Kendall squints against the sun, still facing out over the school. And I realise that, like Portia, I never got to know Kendall—not any real part of her—even after living together for a whole year.

  A silver sedan rolls up, gravel crunching beneath the wheels. ‘That’s my ride,’ Kendall murmurs, a broader smile spreading across her face. She drags her suitcase across the deck and down the steps. The wheels make great thunks.

  ‘Have a nice holiday, Bec,’ she calls.

  I raise a hand. ‘Bye, Kends.’

  She continues down the pat
h, but stops under the banksia tree, turning back. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘I think we’re in the same day house next year. Boyd, right?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  Kendall nods. ‘See you next year, then.’

  She throws her suitcase in the boot of the sedan and climbs in. I can’t see the driver, only their outline turned towards me. The car rolls on towards the utility track, taking the corner slowly, and disappears.

  Now I’m alone. In the empty house, the floor is dusty, marked in places from the beds scraped across the polish. I walk the length of the aisle and I press my forehead against the window. It is cool, at first, but after a while it grows warm, my breath making a fog against the glass.

  I wake early. My back is stiff, and my eyes are crusty from last night’s crying. Groaning, I worm my way out of the sleeping bag. The rest of the campsite is still asleep. How quiet it is, like there is no one else in the world.

  Throwing on my coat I wander towards the river and splash water on my face. The water is arctic, but it wakes me up. I wash my hands until they start to numb then take a few sips, gargling, and spit in the bushes.

  Back at the tent I check my phone. I don’t have any reception, so I scroll to an earlier message from Liv, wishing me luck on my way to Silver Creek.

  As I have got older, friendship has become less complicated. These days I have a wonderful group of close friends: Liv, and Simone, who is now married and is a detective, and Anna, who is also my business partner—together we started a literary journal. There are other friends, of course—new people coming into my life all the time—and each day I feel more open and more confident around them. I’ve finally lost that wariness.

  My friends helped me get back on my feet after Alexis. They did the usual things we all do with friends at such a time, taking me shopping and out to dinner, and simply encouraging me to talk about how I was feeling, even when it tasted poisonous in my mouth. But I was so touched by the immediacy of their kindness; I had forgotten the depth of feeling you have with your friends—how much you love them. It was because of them that I began to let go of so much of what had happened in the past—Silver Creek, Kendall, Portia, Alexis—and to forgive myself.

  Six months later I got my licence back and started driving to work again, with a breathalyser fitted to the car. I kept seeing Mary, because talking to her twice a week made me feel more in control of my emotions and helped me better understand my behaviour. And I began to teach myself that it is possible to have a healthy relationship with the past, especially when it is shared with others over such a long period of time.

  While my head began to clear, there were still times when I felt that darkness scraping at me—I don’t think that will ever go away. That tendency to be frightened of what other people think of me, coupled with that impulse drawing me to people who could do me harm. ‘You can’t change your impulses,’ Mary once told me. ‘But you can at least try to understand them.’

  Once, during a session with Mary, I told her about a dream. I was back at Silver Creek, where a girl stood at the bottom of the vast driveway. Her back to me, she waited near the letterbox, slashing at the grass with a long stick. And there she stood, slashing and slashing, the noise growing louder and louder, until I had woken up to the weak light streaming through my bedroom blinds, drenched in sweat, my heart pounding.

  ‘Even though I was just standing there, it was like I was being chased,’ I’d said to Mary. ‘That was the fear I woke up with: that someone was hunting me down.’

  Recently I saw Portia in the city. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since school, but I knew it was her even before she turned to face me—it was an electric current of knowing, something almost primal about it, because the hairs on the back of my neck actually bristled.

  Immediately I turned away, and so did she, and then we’d stood at the traffic lights, only a few paces from each other. When the lights went green she lurched out onto the road, charging ahead with that familiar, arrogant swagger. I fell back, shrinking into the scarf wrapped high around my face, and when I looked up again she was gone.

  That’s what the girls are like: shadows. Ghosts. Always lurking at the edge of my memory, nudging like a boat tied loose to a jetty. I’m terrified of seeing them, of being confronted, chased, not only at Silver Creek but anywhere. Only now I am uncertain as to why. Is it because of what happened up in Red House, or is it because I have decided to bring them back to life?

  I don’t like to imagine them as adults. I think that’s why I avoided Portia. For me, they will always be girls—baggy and imperfect. Kendall, especially. I know nothing about her life after school. What has become of her? Is she happy? These kinds of questions still plague me.

  ~

  I pack up quickly. Campers are starting to emerge from tents, and a few fires are going. The sizzle of bacon in the pan wafting along in the air makes my stomach growl. Getting into the car, I wave to the couple at the next site, and further along the road a few boys kicking a football stop to watch me drive past.

  Kendall and I did end up at senior school together, in the same house and in a few of the same classes. She still didn’t seem to have many friends, but she did have some.

  In our final year we shared an English class. Our rooms were on the other side of the campus, and we always walked to and from lessons together, chatting amicably—far more than we ever spoke at Silver Creek. We never mentioned Red House, or what happened up there. If she held a grudge, she never showed it. I’ve not met many people in my life with that kind of fortitude, that kind of courage.

  Rolling over the bridge, I look down to the dark river. I’m searching for that branch trapped under the stones, but I can’t see it. It must have come loose last night and washed away.

  I drive on, along the rocky track, and when I come out of the trees, back onto the main road, I get reception again. There’s a message waiting there, from Elinor: Looking forward to tonight x.

  ~

  That night I arrive at the Kelvin early. Sitting at the corner table I tug at the hem of my dress. I’m nervous. I hadn’t known what to wear for this date, but Liv had suggested, without hesitation, ‘That dusky pink number of yours.’

  Now I feel overdressed, overeager. If only I could have a drink to calm my nerves, and I stare longingly at the bottles of wine lining the shelf behind the counter.

  My phone pings with a message. It’s Elinor—she’s running half an hour late. I glance at the wine again, feeling the faintest prickle of irritation. But then I find myself smiling, a smile so wide it hurts my face. It doesn’t matter. This still feels like the start of something special.

  During the early stages of crafting Bad Behaviour I was lucky enough to form a writing group, and as such I am indebted to Jo Case, Rochelle Siemienowicz, Serje Jones and Estelle Tang for their thoughtful responses and constant encouragement about the chapters in progress.

  I’d also like to give special thanks to Kate Goldsworthy and Hannah Kent for reading early versions of the manuscript and for their insightful feedback that was crucial to shaping the book.

  An enormous thank you to Jane Palfreyman, my wonderful publisher, for her unwavering enthusiasm and delicate guidance as the book developed into a living, breathing thing; to Ali Lavau for her brilliant copyediting; and to Belinda Lee and everyone at Allen & Unwin. Thanks, too, to Sandy Cull for the cover design.

  To my agent, Pippa Masson, and all at Curtis Brown, thank you.

  Many thanks to my colleagues at Text Publishing for their continued enthusiasm and support for my writing.

  And last, but not least, to Elinor Griffith—thank you for your love and for always believing in me.

  Rebecca Starford is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. She is the co-founder and publishing director of Kill Your Darlings literary journal and an editor at Text Publishing. Bad Behaviour is her first book.

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