My legs kept buckling beneath me, so David Fox carried me to my room. Water. There was that. Without the beautiful air, the sky circling above me, I thought I would suffocate like a fish from lack of water. He must have got a glass for me, because when I woke up in the morning there was a full glass of water on my desk, right next to my balled-up knickers. I was still wearing my bra, but it was undone at the back, flapping against my breasts. I swatted away the strangeness of this, the discomfort of it. Later, when Sylvie began her short-lived romance with David Fox, something troubled me, something scraped at my nerves, but I couldn’t name it. I wondered if it was jealousy. I was often jealous of Sylvie.
David Fox didn’t mention the water or the knickers, not until long after the party. Not until after I had made the pre-dawn trip to Sydney with Sylvie, for her to wash out his unwelcome seed. I’d stopped going to meetings by then, bored with the posturing and pretending, the plotting for a revolution that would never happen, the talk of equality that was entirely theoretical. Stopped going to their parties or selling their flimsy paper. But he didn’t stop.
The Hunter Street mall was the place to buy books, games, clothes. The place to drink coffee. To wander up and down, hoping that something might happen. I was in my school uniform again, in the last months of school, waiting for my life to begin. I’d come out of the second-hand bookshop, holding bags of books in my arms, and there he was.
We stood awkwardly on the corner of the mall, making polite chitchat and I avoided mentioning my doubts about the likelihood of actual revolution. Eventually, I said, ‘My boyfriend is waiting for me, so—um—nice to run into you, David.’
His face flattened, as though hit by something wet. ‘You’ve got a boyfriend? Since when?’
‘Since about six months ago, I guess.’ I thought about his posturing with Sylvie, thought about me and Sylvie chanting, It’s different for a man, and I added, ‘He’s kind.’ I did not add, although I knew it to be true, ‘He’s gay.’
He grabbed my hand. ‘Kacey, since that night we made love, I haven’t stopped thinking about you.’
The words were so hammy that I honestly assumed he was making some kind of joke, doing a performance riff on movie parting scenes, and so I laughed. I expected him to mime violins, or swooning. Instead, his face did the strange flattening again, his head jerking back, turtle-like, on his neck. ‘I mean it.’
My throat began to tighten. ‘Sorry, what? The night we what?’
His hand was enormous, his skin papery. ‘It meant a lot to me.’
One of the paper bags broke as I clutched the books closer to my chest. I bent to gather them up, piling them into my school backpack. There were three Jane Austens, the Collected Works of T.S. Eliot, a pile of study guides, some assorted new novels. There were no fairytales, with their coded warnings of wolves and woodcutters. I was not yet old enough for those. The tiny shred of anger was so small I could barely feel it, could barely notice its path. Instead I smiled, backing away, books raised to my chest like armour.
‘Stay in touch,’ he said.
And I smiled and bobbed my head, almost a curtsy, and said, ‘Sure. Take care, David.’
I said nothing else, not a word. I held my tongue so hard I almost drew blood.
The hands on the wheel beside me were so pale that they were almost the colour of ash. Veins pulsed slowly in his wrist, below the black leather strap of his watch. It was gold, the watch, possibly a cheap gold, possibly tinted aluminium: I couldn’t tell. This is the time in my life when I can’t tell the difference between real and fake, true and false. Below the wristband, a bone jutted out, a small scab rubbed raw by the leather. Perhaps the leather was fake too. His shirt had cuffs that folded back beyond the wrist, a detail that seemed impressive to me, or at the very least notable, when he picked me up outside of Humpty Doo, where I’d spent the night camping alone down the back of the pub.
I didn’t have a tent. I’d strapped my sleeping bag—now melted—to the outside of my pack, along with the enamel cup that I thought made me a real wanderer. But I had no voice, barely a whisper, no compass, no trust fund and, frankly, no clue. I’d slept on a foam bedroll I’d bought in Armidale, swiping mosquitoes and then, after the heat dropped away in the pre-dawn hours, shivering so hard my bones hurt.
All night I could hear the drinkers at the Humpty Doo pub, the laughter and shouting washing over me like the ocean. In the morning, I found my hairbrush at the bottom of my pack, cleaned my teeth and washed my face in the public toilets behind the pub, then slathered sweet-smelling moisturiser—jasmine-scented, the smell of a Sydney spring—all over my face and hands. And then I stood on the road in front of the pub and waited.
Humpty Doo pub was on a main road, the road that led straight to the Top End. I stood by the roadside, pack on my back and hand down at my side, all casual, just lifting my hand when a car drove by, like I didn’t really mind one way or another. By 11 a.m., I really did mind, not just one way, but every way. When a dark Mercedes drove past me, I screamed every word I knew at it, and then I made some up. It was their responsibility to rescue me, idiots. A kombi drove past, too, with two girls in the front next to a bearded driver. The girls turned their faces to stare at me, a flash of open-mouthed blondeness as they hooted past. Dust pleated up behind them and sprinkled onto my lace-ups, settling with the humiliating tease of that jaunty toot-toot-toot. They were the right kind of girls. Even in the flash of a drive-by I could see it: bikini tops, tans, long blonde and effortless.
Heat baked down on me, shifting from the caress of warmth that had made me soften in the centre. Here, outside the Humpty Doo pub, with dust settling on my arms and legs, the heat was harder: smashing into my face, thickening in my throat. All I wanted was to swim, to dive into the ocean and feel myself swallowed up. Finger pointed nonchalantly towards the road, I swayed, imagining diving into the bliss of blue. But there was just dust, and heat, and the roar of another engine down the track.
The station wagon was blue, the kind of blue that would have been called powder-blue when I was a kid. I remember longing desperately for a powder-blue bedspread. Powder-blue seemed sophisticated, subtle. And I guess I wanted to be subtle. Or, at least, I knew enough to know that I wasn’t.
He leaned over to wind the window down, the bone on his wrist clunking against the glass. Gold-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. He wore a collared shirt—it was the first time I’d seen a collar in the ten days it had taken me to get this far. Truck drivers and roo hunters don’t have much use for a neat button-down.
I’d already slid into the front seat before I could assess his face. Anyway, how would I assess it? How do you decide if the face of the man driving the car alone, the face of the man offering you a lift, is the face of a rapist or a murderer? He wore a silver stud in one ear, he had classical music playing and his name was Michael.
I’d kept my flick knife in the money belt at my waist. The belt had twenty dollars in it, and that knife; I kept the pouch on my left-hand side, so that I could get to the knife if I needed to.
I wasn’t strong. At a free community yoga class earlier that year, I’d been the only person who couldn’t use her own arms to lower herself to a lying pose. I’d flopped, fish-like, my face bouncing slightly on the floorboards. And I wasn’t fit. I’d spent the best part of a year smoking dope every day, drinking every night, eating bags of salted crisps while I tried to forget about the preceding night. And in that year I had not run, not once, anywhere. I had not skipped, or skated, or swum. I had waited, wasted. And I was not brave. Everything made me frightened: the darkness of a river, the bare sky at night, the hum of a city. I had no sense of my own safety, no sense of my own care. But if I had to, I would take that knife from my money belt, and I would slash that ear-ringed motherfucker across his throat, because I knew what happened when you tried to call a man out for what he’d done to you, and I knew precisely how much the world cared.
‘Have you come from the pub?’ He leaned forwards t
o turn the music down. His wedding ring glinted in the sun. Silver, a thin band. Unusual.
‘Nope.’ I stared out the window, trying to decide where I might be from this time, trying to decide on a name, a story. Anything, anyone, was better than my own true one, which had nothing in it of value, nothing of worth. I plummed my vowels up a bit, rounding out my words. ‘I’m visiting. From Kent.’
‘Kent, England?’
‘That’s right.’ I’d met a girl from Kent in a cafe in Sydney. She had blonde hair, dimples, wore fluoro midriff tops that showed off her cute belly. Her accent was bouncy, like her. Easy to study, easy to mimic.
‘Whereabouts in Kent?’
I had no idea where Kerri was from. The knife was hot against my palm. Before Longreach, I’d told a ride I was from Denmark and he said he’d travelled there as a boy. Thank Christ he spoke no Danish. After that, I’d decided to keep it English-speaking. I knew of one place in Kent, thanks to Chaucer and Miss Pitt, an ambitious English teacher. ‘Canterbury.’
‘Right. Always wanted to go there. England, I mean. I’ve never been. What’s it like?’
I thought of the books I’d devoured as a child. I thought of Maisie and the naughty twins, and I thought of the girl from the bush and her mettle. ‘Green. Really very green.’ I kept my words round, tried to hold it all in, the way Kerri did. Gahden. Mah-vellous.
Michael raised his eyebrows. I couldn’t tell if he was buying it or not, so I switched tack. ‘And you? You’re from … ?’ I let it slide away like that. As though I were at a dinner with multiple forks, not sitting in my own sweat, dust lining the inside of my knees, on a track from Humpty Doo.
He asked me why I was in Australia, what on earth had brought me here. And all alone. He looked sideways at me when he said that, alone, and his hand slid off the steering wheel onto the gear stick between us. I angled my knees away from him, turning to the window, watching the red and brown land rush past, and I ran my fingers along the carved metal of my knife.
I kept my hand on my knife and kept my lips moving, my mouth talking, all the way to Darwin. I told Michael the story of how my father—a medic from London—had left my mother and me when I was a kid. Five, I decided. Not even in primary school. Siblings? None, definitely none. And my mother?
I was about to say that she was dead—I liked the idea of the travelling orphan—but then I thought about where I was. Driving through the middle of nowhere, with no trucks or cars in sight, with a stranger. I said that my mother had decided to visit Australia too, and was waiting for me in Darwin. Even as I said it, I was aware that the edges of my story didn’t quite connect, but I was in too deep. I added, ‘I was supposed to pay for her to come out. Since my father …’ I trailed off. ‘Left.’
The pale light of the ocean started to come into view and Michael slowed the station wagon a little. He said, ‘Do you want to earn some extra money while you’re here?’
I did. That was what I was here for, after all.
He gave me that sideways look again. ‘There are quite a lot of ways a girl can make extra cash.’
He looked back to the road, shifted into cruise control. My mouth ran dry.
Michael pointed to the water. ‘You go out on the boats as a cook, you’ll make thousands.’ He tapped his finger on the wheel in time to the song from the pasta advertisement. ‘They’re always looking for girls to cook. I’ll drive by the docks, if you like, so you can see where to go. You just turn up. They’re always after girls.’
Just the phrase made me shiver. I didn’t notice the end point: they’re always after girls. I only heard two words: the docks.
The first time I ran away, I ran to the docks. No, it wasn’t the first time, of course. I ran away daily, taking my clothes in plastic bags, knocking on Aunty June’s door, begging to be allowed to live with her family. They had no room for a little girl, they said, each time giving me an Iced Vo-Vo before they took me home. For years I believed that Aunty June was my real aunt, my blood relative, that I belonged in her family—or that I belonged in some other family, anyway. Don’t all children believe this, or hope for it?
The first time I ran away properly, that was to the docks. I was five. My brother was eight. Perhaps my brother intended us to go for the day, but I believed—hoped—that we were going forever. He held my hand on the bus. The docks were forty minutes away on the bus, and what they had there were ships from other countries. Ships with flags on them. Ships that would go far away, take me far away. It was easy to prise my hand from my brother’s, easy. And I was little, small enough to dodge him, running between the legs of the workers unloading boxes, small enough to bolt up the long ladder of a ship with a Japanese flag flying above it. Small enough, surely, to be put into the pocket of one of the sailors and taken home with them, to be their girl?
This is what I remember: the laughing sailors holding me up above the decking, while the frenzy of the docks buzzed below. This: held aloft by those laughing sailors, like a trophy, a prize, while my brother shouted for me. I could see him, small below me, and I wanted him to cry, to collapse on the ground sobbing for me, wailing the way I so often wailed. But he would not wail. He stood firm. Even from up there, I could see him thinking, making a plan, being brave. He was brave, that boy, even when my father roared at him, lifted him, tossed him like a bag of chaff. My brother would tremble, but he would not break, not then. And so I relented, shouting down to him, shouting to the sailors that the boy down there, that was my brother. They gave us sweet rice with a sticky sauce and promised that I could go live with them when I was a bigger girl.
Running away started then, and it always made things better. Running away always worked.
Blue rose up flat like a painting, so upright that I thought we might smack into it. ‘The docks,’ I said. ‘Yes, take me there.’
He slipped his hand from the steering wheel, dropped it onto my leg. ‘There are other ways. To make cash. Easier.’ When he grinned this time, I could see the black of his fillings. One long finger slipped into the fold between my legs, tracing the ragged fringe of the cut-off jeans. His finger rested there, as though separate from him, a being with its own will. I grappled with the antique clasp of the beautiful carved flick knife inside my money belt. I would cut his hand off if he tried, I’d cut his face, slash his tyres; I wasn’t going there again.
Flat-roofed buildings flashed by outside the car, strange desert fruit. For the first time, I noticed the redness of his face, the man beside me, the man with his finger sliding between my thighs. The safety catch on the knife was disconcertingly secure and the man beside me—how hard would it be, I wondered, for him to wrestle it from me? All my bluster, my bravado, but I couldn’t be Dean Moriarty, I couldn’t be Odysseus or Quixote, not any of the boys, because any of them, those man-heroes with their own knives, they would overpower me the way I’d been overpowered before.
I took my hand out of the pouch and pointed my knees towards the window. I made myself small, as small as I felt. Signs began to appear for the town centre, for lodges, for sites of interest.
‘Actually, drop me here,’ I said. ‘Please.’
He didn’t reply, so I added, ‘My friends will be waiting.’
I’d lost track of the lies I’d told by now. Was I the English girl waiting for her mother? Or the adventurer from another city, looking for work? He didn’t say a word, just slid to the side of the road and waited while I got my pack from the back seat. I didn’t thank him for the ride, and I didn’t wave him off cheerily. Dirt clumped around the wheels as he drove away, while I turned to the horizon. Tilting at windmills, my useless lance in my pocket, my trusty pack on my back.
Heat beat up from the grass outside Lameroo Lodge, great billowing puffs of it like dust from a rug. Under the gum trees, backpackers newly arrived in Darwin lolled like kangaroos, their limbs stretched and crooked, making little noises as they shifted and turned in the shimmering haze. Sometimes a cackle, a caw, from a cluster at the far end of the grass,
and later, some soft murmuring. People had coupled, or grouped, had made themselves into packs and tribes.
At one of the truck stops on the way to the Top End, I’d walked the perimeter of the fence. Wire stretched as far as I could see; when I tucked my hand into it, I thought of the girl in Picnic at Hanging Rock, the one in love with Miranda, the one who is on the outskirts, who is lost, who is alone. When I read that book, I knew who I was supposed to identify with, and yet it was that lost and lonely one who felt so kindred to me. And there, at that fence somewhere near Kackadilla or some such place, my fingers looped through the wire and I held my face against it, longing, lonely, but desperate to be alone, desperate to be silent. An emu walked on the other side of the fence, its legs bending into triangles, its neck stretching along the ground, its beak a sword. We watched each other, each of us alone and ancient. Now, outside the lodge, I was that emu, walking the perimeter, staring in at the clusters of people grouped and huddled on the grass. How did they do that, form themselves like that? I wanted to be with them. I did not want to be with them. I wanted to be indifferent.
Lameroo Lodge was the hostel where all travellers to this north end of Australia ended up eventually. Inside, my eyes blinking in the darkened hallway, I counted out my dollars. I had enough for a room for two nights. I paid in advance and spent almost an hour in the shower, watching the dirt run off my body. Red water pooled at my feet, smearing across the chipped green and yellow tiles. Someone hammered on the door, shouting at me to hurry up, but I kept letting the water wash over me, opening my mouth so it could pour in. I’d been so parched for so long. I washed my clothes and put them in the industrial dryer, and I sat on a spindly chair, reading one of the fat novels that someone had left on the ‘Take, Leave’ table. I left a Carlos Castaneda that I’d picked up in Katherine and, although I’d already read it, I took Of Human Bondage. Feet up on the table, I read and let the churning of the dryer lull me to a kind of peace. Pacified by the warmth and the rhythm and the slowness of Maugham’s words, my head dropped to my chest; I kept thinking about my father, his chin drooping while he harrumphed, ‘I’m not asleep.’ I thought about that and I laughed, and when I lifted my head someone was there, watching me.
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