I’d brought cheap wine, shared with Penny. She’d brought me. As an audience? As the plainer friend? She was a girl who’d got the rehearsal notes. On her bedroom wall was a framed collage of high school photographs: her long hair sliding down her back while she leaned against a boyfriend with his wetsuit peeled to his waist; another of her with a team of girls, their pretty heads close together, eager faces, long legs.
The wine went quickly. I perched on the sofa, smiling mysteriously with my lips closed over my crooked teeth. I’d read, in Rolling Stone, a description of a famous woman, the muse to a musician and then to a designer, who could stand alone in a crowd looking completely calm, completely contained. Sometimes I stood in front of my mirror, experimenting with looking contained, mysterious. Smiling into the distance, deep in thought. But not so deep that I couldn’t be approached. If I was lucky—mysterious enough but approachable enough—I might get to be a muse. The midwife to someone else’s creativity.
Sometime after midnight, I emptied the second bottle and trip-trapped to the kitchen on my new green boots. They clacked on the tiles like teeth. Penny was tangled in the Kokoda Track man, her mouth swallowed, her hands on his neck. I stood in the doorway and waited.
In primary school, girls had best friends and named them, declared them like crushes, signing up to a public kind of coupledom. She’s my best friend. Why are you talking to my best friend? And Lisa O’Daniel was my best friend. She was, consensus had it, the prettiest girl in school. And I was the girl whom pretty girls would choose to be their second-in-command. The not-too-pretty girl, the more-or-less-plain girl who could scrub up all right. In our last year of primary school her family took me with them on a camping trip. I was the poor friend, always the poor friend, dragged along to entertain Lisa, and I knew that this was my job. But this time, there was a boy. Jack? Jake? I can remember his long arms, the way his hair bushed on top of his head, his large teeth. I can remember the way he took my hand on a walk down the bush track to the beach and I looked back, worried that Lisa would see. When he left the campsite, packing up his car with his parents for the rest of their once-in-a-lifetime road trip, he kissed me chastely on the cheek while Lisa watched, and for the rest of the camping trip I was alone. But before he left, with his parents waiting in their hire car, he ran back and whispered to me, ‘She thinks she’s better than you, but it’s the other way around. You’re better, way better,’ and then he kissed me on the mouth, his lips leaving a warm imprint. I’m still not sure who decided that there was a competition: the boy, or Lisa, or me.
In high school, Lisa called me over to her house one night. A crowd had gathered in her front garden, forming a circle with Lisa O’Daniel at the centre: they whooped and cheered while Lisa called me a liar, a backstabber, a slut.
And I told Lisa O’Daniel that I had never been a backstabber.
In the Sydney kitchen with the Kokoda Track man, there was no chanting circle. There was just Penny and the bobbing Adam’s apple of the newly minted film actor. After a while, Penny turned her head to me, eyebrows raised, and said, ‘What?’
I said, ‘I think I’m ready to go.’
‘Then go.’ Perhaps her eyes rolled when she turned back to the actor. Or a shoulder shrug, shaking me off.
I opened my mouth to say, I don’t know where I am, or how to get home, and then I closed it again. I felt for the folded notes in my pocket.
The party was on the outskirts of town. The party was full of strangers.
But the stranger who was dangerous was not in that room.
Outside, the air vibrates with the wetness of spring. Lights blur in and out of focus: cars, streetlights? I can’t tell; can barely tell which is sky and which is road. Both are black, shining with the reflection of a plump moon. Leaving the party, I raised my hand, muttered a drunken goodbye to the room. No one noticed me go, no one raised a hand or an eyebrow as I stumbled out onto the street, my hand luffing in the air, a flag without country, without purpose.
Pieces of gravel flick up beneath my scrabbling feet, somehow falling into my boots, inching down beneath my soles. Bending over, I try to slip my hand into the top of the boot, wriggling my fingers about to find the bits of pebble worrying at my toes. When I stumble, tumbling face first towards the road, there is no one to laugh with, but I laugh anyway, as though I am surrounded by friends hooting joyously at my drunkenness. Nonetheless, I’m sober enough to think this: I need a taxi. It will no doubt use the last of my week’s wages, the small amounts I eke out daily. But still.
It’s hard for me to inhabit my own skin, now, looking back at this staggering, arm-waving girl. Sometimes, now, I see them on the street, girls like me, barely able to stand, and I want to, it’s true, wrap a cardigan around their shoulders, take them home to sleep it off, to sober up. Mother them as I was not mothered, that’s what I want to do. I cannot look at these girls without a rush of fear. I can barely look back at myself, at my shiny coat, my green boots, my bare thighs pimpling in the cool air, my ridiculous faith that the world would take care of me.
Everything is soft: the air, the night, the ground, my legs, my tongue. My hand loose, the arm beneath it unsteady, the ground beneath my feet billowing gently. If the story had been different, if the ending to the evening were different, I would remember this night—if I remembered it at all—as one of many warm spring nights, blending in casual reminiscence. Jasmine scenting the darkness, balmy air on the arms, the pleasures of youth. That’s what I would recall, if I had any recollection at all. If I were not required to remember.
Later, when they ask me what I recall, I will try to tell them. I will try to make it seem that I do remember, because that is what they tell me to do. The Crown prosecutor, who is allegedly on my side, tells me this just before he tells me for the third time that I am not on trial. I meet him only once before the court case: his vowels are round, his chin long. I am distracted by the point at the end of his nose, like a mole drawn on a cartoon witch, and by the fat clamminess of his voice, as though his words are swallowed before they are spoken. He keeps his eyes on the windowsill behind me, or on the papers on his desk. He says, ‘What do you recollect? Try.’
Then, glancing down at my too-tight top, he adds, ‘Is there anything you need to tell me? Is this what you were wearing?’
I wore French knickers, the kind with loose legs. I loved them, the way they slid and slipped against my skin, the cut of them wide and free like 1930s tennis shorts. Penny, the friend who took me to the party, gave them to me as a birthday gift. She’d wrapped them in thin tissue paper and wrote a note on a piece of card: Something beautiful for a beautiful year. Silky, soft; they were a lustrous pearl colour, the shine of them reflecting the light. I suppose they reflected the streetlights outside as the taxi swerved across the white lines. Perhaps the light of his wedding ring was reflected too.
But anyway, when the clammy prosecutor asks me what I remember, the truth is that I recall only this: the slapping of the air, the whirring of the lights, the rushing of the ground. Everything is thick and slow, my movements dulled by the cheap wine. I remember that it felt pleasant being outside, away from the beautiful people, away from Penny and her need for an audience. Perhaps I shouted or whooped into the empty street, arms spread wide, inviting the world to come and get a piece of me if it thought itself hard enough. Did I have a ‘you’ll be sorry’ song stomping through my brain? It’s possible. Anything is possible. My clawing at the soft air, the taxi lights coming closer, the safe and familiar white of the taxi swerving towards the kerb. Like a painting, or a cinema poster, this part of that night carries a semi-lit haze over it. And his face, leaning across, peering through the window, smiling. A smooth face, warm, bearded. I do remember his face. I don’t make that up. Sweat sheening on his forehead.
I’m in the front seat of the taxi. This is Australia. We are egalitarian here. Years after this, when I live in Oxford and jump in and out of black cabs, I will feel myself unfurl with gratitude for the windows
dividing passengers from drivers in taxis, the back seat so clearly separated.
My vinyl coat, so sixties, so retro-chic, sticks against my skin in the warmth of the taxi. My arms are wet in the sleeves. Perhaps I ask him to turn the air conditioning down. My memories now, like the memories of very early childhood, are without words, are purely bodily memories, a series of sensations in the dim dark. Heat. Light. Swerve. Sick. The formation of a single word: no.
I must wriggle out of the coat, sliding against the stickiness of it, or at least drunkenly get half an arm out. When I am picked up later, I have one arm in and one arm out, holding my hands up in the middle of the road while the headlights of another car bear down.
It’s that second taxi driver who I remember, his arm beneath mine, his grey hair curled around his ears. Running, shouting. Somehow, I remember—or imagine—that he wears striped pants, too baggy for his skinny frame. Orange flashes across the road, his hazard lights blinking on, off, where he stopped short in the middle of the lane, running from the car to the girl—me—stumbling, tumbling, in the centre of the road. His hands under my arms as I buckle. A towel retrieved from the boot of the car and wrapped around my bleeding leg; his cardigan draped over my shoulders.
‘I have a daughter your age,’ he says. ‘If anyone ever—if they tried to—’ He stops, looks away.
I wonder what it must be like to have a father who cannot speak for love of you.
By then, the cold air, the resistance of the tarmac underfoot, the crunch of gravel, the shock of my own scream—I think that these things have sharpened me, woken me from the dull daze.
But perhaps they have not.
Because I also remember this: the grainy brown counter of the police station, my hands spread out, while I say, ‘I’ve been—’
I stop then, try to gather myself. Pat at my hair, attempt to wipe at the make-up that I know will be smeared panda-like beneath my eyes. ‘I think I’ve been raped.’
The sergeant in charge is not young. Tall and frowning, he makes me think of my father, himself a policeman. Disappointed, held upright by a thread which could be anger, and with a long, horse-like face. Full of bluff and blunder.
His eyebrows are grey, scraggling across his forehead as he raises them. Holding his hands up, trying to slow me down. ‘Whoa. Let’s start at the beginning.’
I repeat my words, trying for more certainty, trying for the beginning. ‘I’ve been raped.’ The words feel wrong in my mouth, as though the active person in the sentence is me, being raped, rather than the man doing the raping.
The tall constable leans across the counter, looking me over as though I’m a second-hand car. He says, ‘I don’t know about that, girly, but you’ve certainly been drinking.’
This man, I think, is wasted on the front desk. With his investigative skills, he should have been a detective. I’ve lost count of what I drank at the party with the beautiful people who were mystified by my presence. I’ve long ago lost count of the number of times I’d been called girl, or girly. But, because on some level I understand that I am being assessed here, in this vomit-coloured police station, I am careful with my words.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I have.’ I try to make it sound apologetic, and then I add, ‘But I’ve also been raped.’ I correct myself again: ‘I think I’ve been raped.’
‘You think,’ he says, his lip stretching back across his teeth, like my father’s mare when he bridled her, her head tossing, her eyes turning white. ‘It’s the kind of thing you might be certain of.’
In the dark of the taxi, the alcohol swarms through my blood, my head tipped back against the vinyl of the car seat. Warmth floods over me and my tongue becomes heavy, my head begins to nod. I assume—but I can’t be certain—that I give the driver the address before I drunkenly flop. I think I do. I think I wave my hand and slur the suburb. I can still speak, although the syllables run together and the making of complete sentences is a little beyond me. Perhaps I giggle, although my drunkenness at this stage is rapidly descending from the raucous to the morose variety. Laughing for my imaginary audience as I toppled forwards on the gravel while trying to dig out pebbles from my boot—this seems long ago, days ago. Pipe music plays on the radio, the kind of song that might call you to prayer, and, with the heat, I am lulled into a dozydrunken sprawl. My head lolls, my arms flop, my knees drop. I’m vaguely aware of him turning the music up, his hand on the radio dial. Vaguely aware, too, of the way his hand brushes against my leg as he moves it back to the wheel. But then the road is stretching ahead, and the lights outside are flickering, and the taxi takes a turn and another, and then my mouth drops open, and my head bounces lightly against the window; I am dimly, ever so dimly, aware of a little dribble limping down my chin. Pipes drift through the night, which seems to be getting longer. Vanilla, cloying, over-sweet, clotting the air.
I am drifting, dropping into the depths. Like a dream, when you’re aware of being in a dream, but also wanting to be awake. Those dreams when you can hear people talking, when you try to open your mouth and say, I’m here, I’m right here, I can hear you, I’m not asleep at all. The terror of those dreams, of trying to claw up to consciousness. This is where I am, down in the deep, with something troubling me, calling me up to consciousness. My legs sprawling, there is the sensation of another brush across my thighs. I close my eyes tighter, turn slightly in the seat. A hand now, squeezing my leg. Sloppily, I slap at the air.
Alcohol has numbed my tongue, made it heavy in my mouth, so that the words stop that come out as stoooiii. But it does not matter because he does not hear me or my words; he does not feel my hand batting at the air. Or, more precisely, he does not care to hear that or to feel this. Now, when I try to bring this to mind, it’s still the swirl of the street that comes back to me, the way the taxi veers off course, looping across the road, as the driver slips his finger into the shiny silkiness of my new knickers. Now I assume it is his own excitement that makes him swerve, his panting sheening face unable to concentrate equally well on the road.
It is the swerving that brings me more to myself, with a dip of my stomach matching the lurch and then the sudden stop of the car, the wheels skidding slightly, a scraping on gravel, a bounce as the wheels hit dirt or grass. Deep down, in my deepdowndozydrunken self, the lurching echoes. I can still feel the twist of nausea now, all these years later, writing this; the bubble of saliva prickling at my mouth. There is a tear, a tug, the resistance of the buttons on the knickers. A small pop as one button gives way, rolling to the floor.
And then, a heavier lurch, the stab of pain inside me, my vaginal canal forced open, the breath of the taxi driver on my face, his beard on my nose, his voice, his breath, and the thrust of in-out-in-out. My body is limp, my limbs not entirely obedient, but I flail at him. Arms and legs, both, begin to obey the slow and slurred commands from my brain, and though there is little strength in me, my sudden buckling, my fists tearing at his hair, startles him. Enough, anyway, that I am able to shove against the door and tumble out, backwards, like a worm, landing buckled on gravel, tearing the skin from my shins and from my hands. Stones lodge in my knees as I scrabble, hauling myself up to all fours, stumbling to my feet. I run, then, pitching towards the road, towards the gleam of headlights growing closer, making holes in the darkness.
I jumped from a car at fifteen. Ran through a field, grass burrs catching on my clothes, pampas grass cutting me when I scrambled over the back fence to a stranger’s garden.
Sylvie Fagan introduced me to hitchhiking. We were fourteen. It was one of those sweltering Australian Sundays when steam rises off the tarmac. Heat blanketed us in the fibro rented house I lived in. She’d stayed overnight—a rare sleepover for me. Rare for me to have friends over, to overcome my mother’s embarrassment about our house, an embarrassment I had absorbed. I’d learned to apologise for the smallness of the house, for the tiny kitchen, the uncarpeted floors.
We’d lived in the police house in Boolaroo—place of many flies—while m
y father blustered and blistered and bellowed until my mother found a way to leave, and then we moved to the first of many tiny rentals. Most of the sisters had gone by then, licking their own wounds, and when the last sister left I was allowed to move into my own bedroom. Until then, I’d shared a double bed with my mother. At night, her loneliness swelled up, suffocating me, so that I would lie awake, trying to breathe, trying to resist being swallowed by the force of her need. I was nine years old when the last sister left; nine when I got my own room, my own bed. Nine when the curtain of loneliness and sadness stopped squeezing my chest each night. It was still there, though, years later, pulsing through the house like breath.
And then, fourteen, and hitchhiking with Sylvie Fagan to Redhead Beach. We’d set out with bus money in our purses, our string bikinis peeping out beneath little cotton dresses, but while we were waiting at the bus stop two boys in a white Valiant skidded to a stop in front of us. The boy in the passenger seat had long grainy blond hair, a tiny smattering of pink pimples running down the side of his cheeks. He said, ‘Are you girls hitching?’ And as I shook my head, my lips together, mute, Sylvie nodded, opened the back door, and said, ‘Redhead Beach. Thanks, boys.’ She seemed like a twenty-year-old, like someone in a movie. With her flamingo legs, her flicking hair, she’d learned the lessons of how a girl was to be in the world. Open, beaming, up for it.
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