Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  Being a girl, Sylvie told me, that was everything. We had it all, she told me. We ran the world. She was Beyoncé before Destiny’s Child. And she loved it, being a girl. I watched her, curious, furious. There she is, painted in my memory: hip jutted, eyebrows raised, her long hair flying back.

  Vinyl stuck to my thighs, there on the back seat of the car taking the side roads to Redhead Beach. Wind puffed at my face through the open window, and I stared out at the road, saying nothing while Sylvie sat forwards on the seat and babbled to the boys cheerfully. When they dropped us at the beach—right outside the surf club—the boy in the passenger seat said, ‘See you later, quiet mouse,’ and grinned at me so that his mouth made a lopsided curve and my stomach flipped pleasingly. Three hours later, when we were ready to go home, we didn’t bother walking to the bus stop, we just stood on the main road with our fingers pointing out and our dresses tucked up so that you could see the curve of our thighs.

  And so, at fifteen, I stand on the road in the dark, my finger outstretched, an eager smile plastered on my face. I am going to Lisa O’Daniel’s place. There are no buses to her house. My mother is working night shift, and so I hitchhike because otherwise I would be stuck in the tiny house with my new stepfather, his neatly ironed jeans belted beneath his tiny bantam chest, a stream of rage ready to burst out at the slightest provocation.

  It’s not yet summer, and the dark sets in early. I stand under a streetlight so that I will be seen. Smiling, trying to look pretty-but-tough. Gravel crunches, small pebbles scattering up and nicking my shins when the station wagon stops in front of me. Beneath the yellow gloom of the streetlight, the shadow of the wagon stretches to the end of the road, my own shadow blending into it.

  Beneath my hand, the chrome of the door handle is icy; I slip my jumper down over my palm. Inside the car, a thin light glows with the open door, a vague grey light like the inside of a fridge.

  ‘Are you going to the bay?’ My hand is still on the door, ready to run if I need to, ready to jump in if the answer is yes.

  The driver twists in his seat, looking back at me. He says, ‘It’s very dangerous to hitchhike.’

  I want to use his real name, the boy at the wheel of that car. I want to name him, as well as show him. I want him to somehow find his way to this book, to remember the boy he was, and what he did, what he tried to do. His name is Tony de Ropp.

  His name is Mark St Clare.

  His name is John Witt.

  His name is any of the names of the boys you have known. The nice boys, polite boys, who hold the door open. Boys who become men wearing suits or jeans or shorts, nodding in the meeting room and trying to keep their eyes above your neckline. Men who forget, who try to forget, the boys that they were.

  He is tall, his face moon-shaped like John Denver’s and, like John Denver’s, his hair is the colour of straw, with a square fringe feathering above his eyebrows. He knows my sister. He went to school with my brother. He has been to our house. He knows my name.

  I thought, when I began writing this book, that it was just the story of how the ocean saved me so unexpectedly. A story of how I was made new. But then I have to ask this: why does a girl get on a boat with four men, strangers all, and head out to a horizon she has never seen? And to answer that, I have to ask this: why does a girl stick her finger out on a long highway, stretching from one end of the largest island on earth to the other, and get into strangers’ cars, hoping for the best? And to answer that, I have to ask this: why does a girl stand on a road at night, looking into the car with two older boys smirking at her, and choose to get in that car? Why do men, young men and old men, weave to the side of the road, lean out the window, their mouths dry with promise, and tell young girls what they think they need, trusting that fear will give them a free pass? Why might a girl say yes, when she wants to say no?

  On the Ocean Thief, on slow days, we coiled rope. I loved the heaviness of the cord, the way my arms felt the weight of the weave, the way I had to flick and turn to make the rope lie flat. Lining the coils neatly on the upper deck; it gave me a strange pleasure. Making order, I see now: it’s a pleasure that has come to distinguish many corners of my life.

  Uncoiling the why, the how, of the girl I was, the dangers I stumbled into and the dangers I went looking for, is a mixed pleasure. Each length of rope leads to a new one, knotted and tangled, wet with the slime of the ocean’s hidden murk.

  I’d learned, by fifteen, to ask questions, to tell stories, to be entertaining. On some days, I could turn the new stepfather’s mood in the right direction by unspooling the right kind of story. But these boys don’t want my stories.

  Tony de Ropp tells me he knows my sister, my brother. He tells me again that hitchhiking is dangerous. He tells me that this is his father’s car. The boy beside him is in shadow; sitting behind him, I can see the points of his ears sticking out beyond his head, his hair crooked at the base of his neck. I don’t know that boy’s name, I will never know his name. Leaning across the front seat, he mutters something to Tony. The tips of their two heads become the point of a triangle, their shoulders forming the base, while his words blur into the engine’s hum.

  In the back seat, I take up a thread of chatter—invented anecdotes, gossip about teachers, snippets borrowed from books. When the car turns off the road, I keep talking, inventing lies, the lies that I have already learned might save me. Calm, bright-voiced, I tell the boys that I have been learning karate since my first year of high school. It’s hard, I tell them, takes lots of practice, but I love it. Laughing, I tell them about the day my fictional karate instructor made the whole class sit outside for an hour, furious at the way we’d been throwing each other for laughs. I’ll be going for brown belt soon. My voice is bright bright bright, but my chest begins to tighten. I ask Tony where he’s going: I know the way to the bay, and this isn’t it.

  ‘A shortcut,’ he says. ‘We’re taking a shortcut.’

  I peer out of the window, squinting against the reflection of my own face. We’re at the end of a street, the small box houses petering out towards the creek, the paddocks at the end of the road still undeveloped. Squashed against the window, my mouth makes puffs of condensation, little smoke signals against the glass. We drive past the last house on the street; a cheery light bleeds out from the front patio, the shadow of a family inside, gathered around the television. Then there’s a judder, a lift, as the car slips off the tarmac, up over the gutter.

  In the front seat, Tony de Ropp hoots, ‘Yee-hah, let’s go off road.’

  Outside, it’s just moon and stars now. The streetlights have gone, and the car is bumping, each jolt jarring my back. In the rear of the station wagon something clangs and chimes with each ditch, each turn. My hand slips into the catch on the door, and I flick the lock open. Beside Tony, the boy whose name I will never know has started whooping with him, as though he’s in an advertisement for Coke or Land Rovers. The boy’s hand reaches into the back, flailing around, trying to reach my leg. ‘Having a good time, K.C.?’

  I’ve seen films where people jump or fall from moving cars. They roll neatly and then lie, staring up, panting. Or they get up and run.

  This is the way I like to remember it: that I push that door open, and I roll, like a brown-belted karate stuntwoman, like Supergirl, like Diana of the hunt. But all I know is this: my shoulder shoves against the door as the car slips into another ditch. There’s a gut-wrenching crack, and then I am swinging on the door, my legs following my body, dragging on the mud. Inside the car, the boys are shouting. I remember to let go. I don’t so much roll as scramble, my limbs sagging behind me, out of my control. The car slows as I scrabble upright and begin running to where I think the houses might be. I’m not sure. Beneath my feet, there’s stubby grass, mud. Ahead, in the darkness, something that might be a low fence and, beyond that, a sprinkle of house lights. Or not house lights. Streetlights? I can’t tell. I have no idea where I am. The car is idling behind me. Tony de Ropp shouts, ‘We just w
anted to scare you. We just wanted to teach you a lesson.’

  I stop running. I screech back, ‘Fuck you. You’re not my teacher.’

  In fact, now that I remember it, that was the night I arrived, grass-stained and battered, at Lisa O’Daniel’s house to discover the little audience of teenage girls and their boyfriends she’d assembled, while she circled me, calling me slut, backstabber, liar. She recited it over and over, like a chant, while I tried to ask, Why? What did I do?

  After a while, I stopped asking, and stood with my palms up, letting her words hammer down until the bruises bled together into their own map, a landscape of mortification.

  The lady police officer has a carefully arranged kind face. She looks young, not much older than me, her tidy ponytail barely touching the top of her cotton collar, a smear of gloss on her lips. A few strands of hair have slipped out, clumping across her forehead. She keeps patting at the damp hair, smoothing it down. Her hair is the colour of hessian; it makes me think of kindergarten sack races, those joyous, chaotic events that ended up with a pile of giggling five-year-olds wriggling on the ground, puppy-like. She says, ‘I’m Constable Turner. Do you need a glass of water?’

  Water is not the first thing on my mind, but I nod anyway.

  It’s the older officer, the one who makes me think of my father, who asks most of the questions. He says, ‘And you sat in the front of the taxi?’

  I nod. ‘Yes.’

  He sighs. ‘Next to the driver?’

  I nod again.

  He sighs again. ‘And how much have you had to drink?’

  Obediently, I try to do a mental calculation. ‘We—’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and my friend, Penny.’

  He looks around, as though expecting her to materialise beside me. Pale flesh shakes slightly on his chin as he swivels back to me. ‘And where is she now?’

  ‘At the party, I suppose. She—I was ready to leave. She wasn’t.’

  ‘So, you were at a party? And you left without your friend?’

  I look at Constable Turner, who stares at the notepad in front of her, the pen lying across the page. The note of accusation in the sergeant’s voice is clear, but I am unsure precisely what I am being accused of. Unsure whether the greater sin was leaving my friend at the party or being at the party in the first place.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I told you that. I was at a party and then I wanted to go home, and I went outside, and I got a taxi.’

  In another room, with a cooling cup of tea in front of him, the soft-faced man who brought me here is filling in his details. A single policeman, a young constable in his first month on the job, is taking his statement. It was another taxi that stopped; the driver got out of the car, put his hand under my elbow and guided me into the back seat. To that driver I’d said, ‘Please, just take me home,’ and he’d said, no, the police needed to know what had happened. They needed to stop this man. ‘Most of us,’ he said, ‘are good guys. He gives us a bad name. Just think,’ my kind rescuer said, ‘just think what would happen if another girl was picked up by him. Don’t you want to stop him?’

  So, I am here, trying to stop him, after cowering in the back seat, head down, while this man, the driver of the second taxi, followed the first, took note of the licence plate. He did his duty for me, and now I am doing mine for all the other girls.

  The sergeant asks again, ‘So you were drinking before you even went to the party?’

  I take a sip of water. It bubbles down my throat, sweet as air, and I keep swallowing until I have guzzled the whole glass.

  ‘And then you kept drinking at the party?’

  I try for levity. ‘That’s what usually happens at parties.’

  He glares at me, writes something on the pad in front of him, then looks at my little green top, at the neckline that I’d cut out with kindergarten craft scissors, the kind with zigzag shapes, to make a bigger V against my cleavage. ‘How much?’

  I shake my head; the room spins. ‘A bottle of cider before we left. We took two bottles of wine to the party. We drank them both. But maybe some other people helped. I don’t know.’

  ‘And?’

  In the same way that I was raped seems like the wrong sentence, focusing on the wrong person, it seems to me that the horse-faced sergeant is asking the wrong questions, of the wrong person. But I am too drunk and too bewildered to find the words. There is something tight and boiling about the uniformed man in front of me. Ready, like my father, to turn to anger. So, I am trying. I am trying to help him to help me. That’s all he wants, he explains earnestly. He needs the whole picture; my statement will be used later. It matters. Everything, anything I can tell him. The whole truth. He needs the truth.

  I add, ‘And a glass of Benedictine.’

  ‘Right.’ He lifts his eyes to me. Waits, pen poised.

  ‘Two glasses of Benedictine.’

  He writes something else down. Rusty brown spots cover the back of his hand.

  Constable Turner twists her stubby ponytail. Her fingernails are bitten, like mine. I want to like her. I really want to like her, and I desperately want her to like me.

  I’m in that boxy room for over an hour, with the walls beginning to shine with condensation. Hot air presses on me, the smell of the floor polish mixing with the scent of my own fear, the smell of my own tears. I drink a cup of cold tea with three sugars. Beneath the table, my legs start to shake, small tremors shuddering up and down my thighs, like isolated electric shocks. Anger begins to bubble in my gut, and I eat it down with the plate of sugared biscuits they put in front of me. When I’ve eaten all the biscuits, I move my finger across the plate, tamping the sugar and crumbs into my fingertips.

  The sergeant asks patiently why I sat in the front seat of the taxi; he asks me if I always sit in the front seat of taxis. He is, he says, trying to help me; these are the questions that will be asked in court. I hadn’t thought about court. I hadn’t thought about anything except getting off the road, getting home, taking the next step, getting away. But now I am here, and I have already told Sid, the kind driver of the second taxi, that I will do my best to stop this man, do my best to help other girls. I say, yes, I want to pursue this. Somewhere, down in the pit of me, not completely crushed by the landslide of biscuits, the tiny worm of anger begins to flourish.

  ‘And then he stopped the car?’ Constable Turner taps her pen against the table. It’s the first question she’s asked, and I’m startled.

  ‘No. He—I was asleep—I mean, sort of.’

  ‘Beside him?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘In the front seat. Beside him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you fall asleep? Would you do this often in a taxi?’

  I wonder, briefly, whether Constable Turner has ever gone out drinking with her girlfriends, whether she’s stood on a bridge, or by a park, singing songs to the moon, feeling invincible.

  She taps her pen again. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then I felt him—he—inside me.’ I try to correct myself. ‘Not straight away. There was—he sort of—there was some touching. I wasn’t sure. I tried to move away, I guess—and something—I couldn’t tell what was happening.’

  She says, ‘I understand this is difficult.’ Her eyes lower to the pad in front of her. I realise then that she doesn’t understand at all how difficult this is. That we are different kinds of young women, on different sides of the table.

  I say, ‘He was groping at me, I guess—I didn’t know, wasn’t sure what it was, just—and I tried to brush him off, I sort of didn’t want to notice it. I hoped I was imagining it, or that he’d just stop, you know?’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘And?’

  ‘And then the car—I think it swerved, I don’t know—and then the car—I guess we went off the road. It stopped and he—’ His beard, black and damp with spit, his skin stinking above me, the peeling back of the silk of my beautiful French knickers, the push, the pull—

  Sh
e says, ‘You were asleep, and he put his penis inside you? He penetrated you?’

  I blink slowly. Was it his penis? The word, penis, seems small, pink, soft. I am distracted, thinking about those two words: penis, penetrate. How close they are. The constable continues the tap-tap of the pen against the tabletop. What was inside me? Inside me was guts blood intestine veins pulpy masses of fat and muscle pulsing heart wet lungs. What else? A penis? A finger?

  ‘He put something inside me. I assume it was his penis. I didn’t check.’ The little worm of anger lifts its head. ‘He was driving a taxi and I thought I was safe. Jesus fucking Christ.’ I’m trying to be careful, to remember, to feel. Was it a finger? Was it a fist? A penis? But it’s awkward now, to stop, to pause, to reconsider.

  The sergeant raises his eyebrows. The alcohol, the language. The lack of decorum, the excess cleavage. Everything about me, I realise, offends him.

  He says, ‘Are you someone who would generally tell the truth?’

  I say, ‘Are you asking if I’m lying? If I’m a liar?’

  Constable Turner makes a shushing shape with her lips, and then she smiles. Lips closed; teeth hidden. She leans across the table, rests her hand on my wrist. Her skin is cool. She says, ‘I know you’re upset, but—’

  Right then, I hate her. Her neat ponytail, her clean, uncreased shirt, her tapping pen. Everything about her is as repugnant to me as I am to her colleague. I hate that I am on this side of the table—the side where the trauma sits—and she is on the other.

  I say, ‘Fuck off. You have no idea how upset I am.’ My words slur a little and the sergeant raises one grizzled eyebrow.

  But the words burn, the questions burn. The sergeant has seen me for what I am: a liar, a girl with the certain knowledge that the imagined life is superior, a girl who wants to spin gold from straw.

  Rebecca Garden introduced me to the thrill of the lie. Rebecca Garden is the most beautiful girl in kindergarten. Her slight nose upturns like a cartoon nose, the freckles trailing across it. Her hair is golden, twisted every morning into perfect ringlets.