‘Hey,’ he said.
That was it, and there was nothing in that moment, in that first meeting – in all the times I replayed it later, when it mattered – that shouted a warning to me, nothing that said he is kissing you and drinking her in, nothing that whispered in my ear to be careful.
It was just the three of us, laughing and talking and finding room for each other on our towels under a perfect sun.
*
That summer of my sixteenth birthday, Josh claimed my family as his own, helping the boys build their infamous exploding volcano in the backyard – rocks, mud, sand, sticks, a hose and a whole lot of trouble – holding the ladder steady for Harry as he cleaned the gutters in the roof, sitting elbows down at Rose’s kitchen table, chin poised on his clasped hands underneath, huge smile dimpling at his cheeks, waiting to be fed.
Rose had said we could only see each other one night a week during school term, and on weekends after I had done my study.
She told Josh it was important that I do well, that I didn’t need any distractions – Josh, of course, being the distraction. He had smiled and nodded and continued to turn up at our house most nights just before dinnertime anyway.
Rose would hear the bike creaking up the grass and the gate click, and would roll her eyes at me and sigh, but both Josh and I knew there was no way in the world she would turn away a hungry boy from her table.
‘Does your mother know you’re here?’ she would ask, and Josh would nod because it was easier to do that than to explain that Pearl Keaton would barely have looked up from her ciggies and her crosswords for long enough to notice he was gone.
Pearl lived in a veil of smoke, sitting on her couch, her crossword puzzles spread out on the table with its ringed coffee cup stains and a bottle-green glass ashtray brimming with butts in front of her.
‘Hello, darl,’ she’d say when Josh led me by the hand past her up to his room, ‘you two behave yourselves up there!’
I would feel Josh wince beside me, wince at his mother’s crassness, her carelessness, the knot of her dressing-gown loose, her feet encased in giant puppy-dog slippers.
‘Why didn’t you get dressed, Mum?’ Josh would ask. ‘You knew Tallulah was coming.’
‘Well, excuse me, Peter Prissy,’ she’d say, ‘you don’t mind, do you, love?’ and I’d shake my head, embarrassed for all of us.
Pearl worked as a cashier at the TAB, had one friend called Caroline she went to the local football club with every Friday night, worked split shifts to put a roof over her son’s head and told him that when his father, Davie Keaton, had gone to sea, it was no great loss.
Maybe it wasn’t, but when I saw the way Josh was with my parents, the way he sat at our table and drank in Harry’s words, I wondered.
I didn’t like going to Pearl Keaton’s, didn’t like the lies I had to tell Harry and Rose to get there.
I hated the shut-in rooms and the stained linoleum, the inevitable tussle on Josh’s bed once we climbed the stairs to his room while he grappled with my clothes and I grappled with my Catholic sensibilities.
It seemed faintly ridiculous now, but it was 1982, I was a sixteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, and every time Josh touched me, somewhere in the back of my mind was Eve giving Adam that damn apple and cursing mankind for all eternity.
I was scared of sinning, worried Josh would no longer be interested in me if I let him go ‘all the way’, afraid I would fall pregnant and have to move away like Lisa Fitzgerald, banished to a grandmother in Longreach, her baby stowed away in the car like a fugitive.
‘You don’t,’ mothers up and down every street in our neighbourhood told their daughters, ‘want to end up like Lisa Fitzgerald’ as if the direst thing in the world had happened to her, that she had caught leprosy or had been sold into white slavery.
I thought about Lisa, a vague imprint of a tall girl with glasses and a hooting laugh and wondered how she did ‘end up’. I wondered if she knew she was the poster girl for celibacy at St Rita’s and that I thought of her every time Josh reached for me.
I would be wrapped around him, our limbs as close as crossed fingers, torn between wanting him and the knowledge that good girls didn’t do this kind of thing and bad girls got sent to Longreach.
*
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Annabelle said to me one morning, ‘all this puffing and panting is nauseating, why don’t you just have sex with him and be done with it?’
‘I just don’t want to yet.’
‘Why? It’s really no big deal.’
‘Annabelle, I really wish you’d stop going on about this – why is so important to you anyway?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t even had sex yet.’
‘Oh, yes, I have, and let me tell you, it’s really nothing to write homosapian about.’
‘You’ve had sex?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who with?’
‘Mark Morris.’
‘You’ve had sex with Mark Morris?’
‘Yep, in his car.’
‘You had sex with Mark Morris in his car?’ I didn’t even know she knew Mark Morris, the vice-captain of the St Joseph’s rugby team, save for occasionally saying, ‘Get stuffed, Mark’ when he called out something stupid when we walked past.
‘Look, Tallulah,’ she said, ‘as much as I’d like to stand around while you repeat everything I say, I’ve actually got some homework to do.’
We kept walking down the street together, but now Annabelle was doing this weird, exaggerated sashay, sort of swishing her hips and swinging her schoolbag in front of me, like a pendulum.
I kept my head down and stared at the footpath, confusion prickling at my body and, for some reason I could not understand, tears gathering deep in my lids, hot and salty and childish.
Annabelle could swing her bag all she liked and pretend that this was just another conversation on our way home, but she knew and I knew that it wasn’t.
We kept walking in silence until she stopped, put her bag down and said, ‘Why are you carrying on about this?’
‘I’m not carrying on, I haven’t said a thing.’
‘Presactly, Tallulah. Look, I don’t have to tell you every little thing that happens in my life, do I? I’m sure you don’t tell me every detail of what goes on between you and Josh.’
I kept my head down, afraid to look at her, this new Annabelle who had not only had sex, but had also started to keep secrets from me.
We came to the corner where we usually had our ‘Your house or mine?’ conversation and I headed straight for home without her, and straight to my room.
‘Lulu,’ Rose called out, ‘aren’t you coming downstairs? There’s fruit and biscuits on the table,’ but I buried my head in my pillow and knew I couldn’t eat a thing.
That night, Josh took me to the movies in a borrowed car.
Coming home, we pulled over in the street next to mine and he started kissing me, tugging at my jeans and pulling my belt loose.
‘Don’t, Josh,’ I said.
‘Why not, Tallulah-Lulu?’ he mumbled, face in my hair.
‘I’m just not ready.’
‘Jesus, Lulu.’ He let out a long sigh. ‘What’s wrong this time?’
‘Nothing’s wrong, Josh, I just don’t want to.’
Drumming the steering wheel with his fingers, Josh said, ‘Well, when are you going to want to?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered. ‘Stop asking me all the time.’
He ran his hands through his hair. ‘There’s lot of girls I could ask, you know.’
‘Fine,’ I snapped, opening the door. ‘Ask one of them, then.’
‘Maybe I will,’ he said, as I slammed it.
But he didn’t. Instead, he came over the next day with a bunch of carnations he’d bought at the service station on the way over, and said he was sorry.
/> ‘I know I shouldn’t pressure you,’ he said, scratching the back of his ear. ‘Do you want to, like, get married or something? Would that help?’
I laughed and took him in my arms, and told him that wouldn’t be necessary.
*
To get to Craybourne Island you drove across a dubious bridge in Wattle Beach which seemed to sag every time a car rumbled over it, and where during the day kids jumped like starfish from its railings, shouting to the sky as they leapt.
I had been to Craybourne many times, day trips with Harry and Rose, and later sandwiched between Mattie and Sam, the boot loaded with eskies and umbrellas and collapsible chairs.
I’d been there on school excursions year after year to study Craybourne’s famous soldier crabs, I’d been with Stella and Simone on a camping trip when we were twelve, I’d been with Annabelle who pronounced it Cray-boring, but now, driving across the bridge with Josh, I felt like I had never seen it before in my entire life.
The bridge rumbled beneath the car as it always had, the boats bobbed for apples in the harbour, but nothing seemed familiar at all, sitting in Josh’s new car with my hands in my lap, rubbing my thumbs together.
He swung into the car park of the Half-Moon Motel, its neon sign flashing a sliver of a crescent every few seconds.
Josh turned off the engine, leant over.
‘How’s that for romance, Lulu?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you the moon.’
‘It’s very nice, Josh,’ I answered, trying to find something to say. ‘Very lunar.’
It was my seventeenth birthday and I had spent it lying to Harry and Rose, telling them I was staying at Annabelle’s for the night. ‘Annie’s making me a cake,’ I’d said, half-hoping, I think, to be caught out by the improbability of my words.
Josh kissed me, his mouth deep on my neck, his hands underneath my shirt, then, his voice saying, ‘Let’s go inside.’
I followed him with my head down, scared stiff that someone I knew – or worse who my mother knew – would see me there, loitering with Josh Keaton at the reception of the Half-Moon Motel.
‘With intent,’ Annabelle said the next day when I told her not quite everything.
‘What?’
‘You were loitering with intent.’
We giggled together on her bed where we lay on our backs, and I asked, ‘With intent to what?’
‘With intent, young lady,’ she said sternly, ‘to get laid.’
Then we collapsed in laughter.
But that night wasn’t really what Annabelle and I had reduced it to while giggling on her bed.
Not at all.
‘Come here,’ he’d said.
The half-moon outside blinked on and off, so every few seconds I could see his brown arms reaching out for me, his hands clasping the back of my neck, pulling me towards him.
Tracing the outline of my lips with his finger, he took my hand in his and slid it lazily down my body, hooking his fingers onto my skirt.
‘Wait,’ he said, smiling and swinging his legs off the bed.
From his sports bag he took out a candle, his cassette recorder and a tape.
He set the candle out on the cupboard beside the bed, and lit it, its tiny flame finding beauty in the shadows, and clicked the tape into the recorder.
‘I made this for you,’ he smiled.
I closed my eyes as he came back to the bed, feeling his breath on my body, and his hands running over my skin, the two of us laughing at the goosebumps they produced.
‘You’re beautiful, Tallulah-Lulu,’ he said.
‘So are you,’ I replied.
And as the sea and his sixteen-track mixed tape played the soundtrack of us, so were we.
Stella, Simone and I had been meeting up at Gottardo’s Café for years – I loved it because the coffee was excellent, Simone loved it because the owner played Dean Martin songs incessantly, and Stella loved it because she loved anywhere she could get away from her children and breathe for a second.
After I left the hotel I had phoned and asked them to meet me there – it was the only place I could think of to go to, with the only two people I could think of to go to.
It was about a ninety-minute trip from Juniper Bay to the city, plenty of time to think about what I had done, for the shame to gather deep in my bones and rattle all the way.
Plenty of time to think about how stupid I had been to think I could go back and walk away unscathed.
The past was another country and only exceptionally stupid people visited it.
I swung the car into Gottardo’s car park.
There was always going to be damage done, but I could not believe I had been the one to do it. I was the one who had put that damn tape back in the recorder and pressed replay.
‘Stupid, stupid girl,’ I told myself in the rear-view mirror, ‘they don’t even have cassettes anymore.’
Stella and Simone were already there when I arrived and sat down, Stella’s three-year-old son, Riley, curled up in a ball under the table.
‘I’m sorry, Lulu,’ Stella said, ‘he really wanted to come.’ Riley began to lick my shin under the table. ‘He thinks he’s a cat,’ Stella continued. ‘It’s driving me crazy, he won’t answer to anything else but Mr Socks, and I have to give him his milk in a little bowl . . .’
‘For fuck’s sake, Stella,’ Simone interrupted, ‘don’t encourage him, remember when Grace thought she was a horse and you ended up enrolling her in pony club.’
‘I did not enrol her, Simone,’ said Stella, ‘I just took her there and let her have a bit of a run around the paddock . . .’
‘Can you hear yourself, Stella?’ said Simone, stirring her coffee. ‘Can you actually hear how ridiculous that sounds? Now enough kinder talk, I want to hear all about the wedding – spill, Lulu.’
I looked at her and thought that even in her wildest dreams, Simone would have no idea what I was about to say.
‘I’ve done something terrible,’ I said quietly.
Simone looked at me. ‘What do you . . .? Lulu, what’s wrong?’
The shame scorched at my skin, sending my hands to my face, fingers pressing deep into my eyes, as the tears came again, spilling through them.
‘What is it, Lulu?’ Stella said, standing up and coming around the table to stand next to me.
She put one hand on the side of my face. ‘There,’ she said, patting my hair and using the voice that must have soothed her five children through all their assorted childhood anxieties. ‘Everything’s all right, Lulu, whatever it is, everything is going to be all right.’
I sank into her, burying my face in her dress and hoping that, somehow, some of Stella Maria Patricia Mary McNamara’s goodness would seep into me.
‘Lulu,’ said Simone sharply, ‘what on earth have you done?’
‘I slept with Josh Keaton on his wedding night,’ I whispered into Stella’s stomach.
‘What?’ said Simone.
‘I slept with Joshua Keaton on his and Annabelle’s wedding night,’ I confessed to her belly button.
‘Lulu,’ coaxed Stella gently, ‘we can’t help you if we can’t hear you.’
‘Tallulah,’ Simone snapped, ‘we can’t hear a bloody word you’re saying.’
‘ALL RIGHT,’ I shouted at her from across the table. ‘I HAD SEX WITH JOSHUA KEATON ON HIS WEDDING NIGHT.’
Stella’s hand flew to her mouth and Simone, who I am fairly sure was smiling, said calmly, ‘Oh Lulu, Annabelle is going to scratch your eyes out.’
‘Meow,’ said Riley from underneath the table.
*
When I got home later that night, the phone was ringing, but I ignored it in favour of lying on the couch with a pillow over my head.
I heard the answering machine click on, then my father’s voice.
‘Hello, this i
s a message for Lulu de Longland,’ he announced, making me smile in spite of myself. No matter how many times I told him he could just speak normally to me if the machine answered, he always spoke formally to it first, like he was addressing the United Nations.
‘Lulu, it’s your father, how was the reception? I’m sorry I couldn’t stay, but I’m sure you all had a good time.’ I winced, thinking, ‘Well, two of us did . . .’ Then he added, ‘Look I’m sorry to bother you, love, but your mum’s gone a bit downhill. When I got home from the wedding she was wearing Doris – anyway I’ve made an appointment with the doctor but if you’ve got any time to come see us in the next week or so, love, that’d be great. Thanks, love, this is the end of the message for Lulu de Longland from Harry de Longland – her father.’
‘Oh, Harry,’ I said into the pillow.
I stood up, wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, pulled my hair off my face, the way Rose liked it, and was just running upstairs to change when the phone rang again.
‘Lulu,’ a voice I knew well said, stopping me on the fifth stair. ‘Sorry I didn’t call earlier but we’ve had all sorts of delays over here – as per usual – but anyway, things are back on track and I’ll try you again a bit later. Hope you’re well – how was the wedding? Looking forward to hearing all about it. All right, well, take care and I’ll try again later.’
Ben Moreton.
My boyfriend.
‘I’m sorry, Lulu,’ he had said two weeks earlier, ‘but it’s still beyond me why you would even want to go to the wedding.’
I’d watched the familiar lines of his shoulders and neck hunched over as he packed his suitcase on the table by the window, carefully colour-coding his shirts and ties as he went.
‘Ben,’ I said, ‘we’ve been through this, Annabelle and Josh are my oldest friends, and I know you don’t understand—’
He spun around, words tumbling out of his mouth. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ‘I don’t – I don’t understand why you would choose to go to that wedding when you could come to Hong Kong with me. Why Lulu? Why? So you can be humiliated by that woman all over again, so that Josh can stand there with that stupid smirk on his face and tell you how lovely you look? So that Annabelle can talk to you in that ridiculous language and the two of you can pretend you’re still twelve years old and that nothing bad ever fucking happened? Is that it?’
Walking on Trampolines Page 5
