Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  How satisfying it was, to drive my teeth against their flesh, to feel the resistance of muscle. I remember this: grinding my teeth, as though I were a dog, eating raw meat, biting harder and harder. And the victory, to see a perfect curve of teeth, my brand, my warning. I was little, with blonde pigtails, but I wanted to leave the red imprint of my teeth. This is what I remember: the pleasure of giving vent to my fury, the certainty that my wild, hungry anger would protect me. Pleasure in their shock, that someone so little, so cute, so blonde, could run at them with such rage, could long to draw blood, to eat them whole. Little Cannibal. Little Fury. How I gloried in those names, how I felt I’d earned them, how I felt they would save me.

  Aunty June’s porch is like a square stage opening to the theatre of lawn, distinguished with grass, flowerbeds and a wooden seesaw. Sally and I stand on the seesaw instead of sitting, and sometimes she pushes me off and calls me stupid. But I am not stupid because my ladder of words will get me out of here, out of Boolaroo, way past the sky, way above the moon.

  Aunty June says the word first, standing with her hand on my mum’s arm, leaning in close and whispering to her. She has given me the last of a peanut butter jar and I am dipping my spoon in, dip, dip. ‘It was a shocking pain,’ Aunty June says—and here her voice goes soft and dreamy—‘in my vagina.’

  I think of a beautiful girl, my little girl, who would fly above the whole of Boolaroo. She would have long golden hair and she would wear white maxi dresses with pink frills on the bottom. My spoon goes down to the jar, rests there. The peanut butter is thick and sweet in my mouth, and I have to swallow to form the words.

  ‘Vagina,’ I say. ‘That’s a beautiful name. If I have a daughter one day, I will call her Vagina.’

  The pause is terrible. My spoon makes a soft clunk on the lino. Beside me is my little red case, ready for me to take across the road to our house with the lock-up. It has a black handle, slippery and shiny, and inside the case there is only my bear, Yogi.

  Aunty June and my mother are staring right at each other, and their shoulders shake in the way that grown-ups do when they want to be stupid. Eyes on each other, hands over mouths, little laughing shaking shoulders.

  At home, my mother says to the biggest of the sisters: ‘Vagina. She wants to call her daughter Vagina!’ And they both laugh some more. Outside the steps are cool, and if I sit at the bottom of the steps, I can’t hear them in the kitchen cackling and laughing. Vagina! Vagina! Vagina!

  I shuffle down to the bottom step and keep my eyes on the top of the lock-up door. There’s a drunk in there tonight; I can’t see his face, only his finger, sliding up and down around the bars, and I call out to him, ‘Hello!’

  ‘Is that a little girl?’ he says right back, and I say, ‘Yes, it is me, a little girl.’

  His face pops up at the bars then. Mauve in the last light, his face is like the cartoon with the strange words and the mole that keeps getting hit. Long and droopy and with a nose that goes all the way down his face, all the way to his chin, and even though he is a man and a grown-up, he is crying in the lock-up. We sit together, the prisoner and me, listening to the cackling from the kitchen and feeling the sky unfolding over Boolaroo. When the dark comes right down, he sings me a song about Saint Peter and a company store. And then I teach him a song I learned from Lisa on Adventure Island, and then we sit in silence, but his face drops down so all I can see is his finger holding tight to the bars. One of the sisters brings him food on an enamel prisoner’s plate—baked beans and egg and toast that my mum has cooked for him—and tea in a white enamel mug, and then the sister says I have to go inside.

  Inside I can’t breathe. I try to think about my daughter Vagina and how kind I will be to her, but when I see her in the white maxi dress now my stomach twists with something sour and I only see Aunty June with her hand on my mum’s arm. Now, I will call my daughter Lisa after Adventure Island. Or perhaps I will call her Clown. Or Flowerpot.

  Cunt is later. The first time, I’m still in infants school. A teenage boy offers me a ride on his bike. I sit on the bar in front of him. He says, ‘Do you know what a cunt is?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. Unwilling to admit that I don’t know, that I am after all a little kid, I think of what it sounds like—cup!—and declare, ‘It’s something you drink from.’

  The boy laughs, and although it’s a nasally mean laugh, when he says, ‘Do you want me to show you?’ I say yes, because I don’t know what else to say and because I want to know all the words. It’s not painful. I’m not sure it’s even shocking. With one hand on the handlebar, the boy slides his hand into the leg of my cottontail knickers. One finger slides the length of my crease and into what I can only assume is my cunt.

  I keep my hands on the handlebar. Red tape is wound about the bar and I worry at the tape with my nails. When the boy drops me at the end of my street, I notice that I have red flecks of tape inside my fingernails. I scrub at them in the bath that night, but they remain, small wormish shreds that stay beneath my nails for days.

  It was a rare day. There’d been a catch overnight, a full net dropping into the tray while the stars beamed bright and friendly. Daylight was golden and alive, and we cut through the gulf on a steady sea. My arms were forming into muscle, my calves strong from standing all day, and there was a calm on the boat and sunshine pouring yellow across the Ocean Thief.

  I’d climbed up to the wheelhouse deck and was lying with my bikini top untied, my head resting on my arms. My shadow stretched down the length of the wheelhouse ladder. Beneath my shoulder, the curve of my breast swelled like a small world. I tried to imagine a painting of it, tried to imagine painting it myself. It seemed extraordinary in that moment, the way the world appeared through the triangle of sight between breast and arm, the roundness of me like a mountain, powerful, crushing. And then, when I looked away from the peeling hull beneath me, just glanced through the armpit and into the sea, and felt the sun stroking me: I could be anywhere. With this view, this sifting glisten of light on water, the ocean sun baking us: I could be on the yacht, I could be a millionaire’s daughter, I could be anyone. One of those Vaucluse judge’s kids, the one who’d grown up in a mansion on the harbour, or the surgeon’s son I house-shared with. They’d met at one of the residential colleges, shared stories formed under the old stones, the banners with names listed on them, including the names of their own parents. I watched and listened, learned what to be ashamed of, what to apologise for, what to order for dinner; I watched so carefully you might think I was one of them.

  There was a moment, years after I had left the Ocean Thief, at a dinner in Oxford. My host was sandy-haired, with a long, angular body, the ease of the natural sportsman, the charm of the natural host. I’d taken my shoes off, as I often do, and tucked my feet up on the sofa. These were good friends. We spent many evenings together; my toddlers played with their pre-schoolers, gazing adoringly at the big kids. My friend went to a boarding school where he was required to wear a tailcoat, and from there to one of the better Oxbridge colleges. He grew up with people like himself and, to him, I appeared to be in more or less the same camp. By the time I came to be sitting on his sofa, I was a writer with some awards under my belt; I taught writing for the University of Oxford; I knew how to round out my vowels and which fork to use. We were talking, that evening, about British politics, about the politics of class. Casually, I said, ‘Well, growing up in a working-class family—’ I didn’t mean ‘working class’, of course; I meant ‘poor’.

  I didn’t get to finish the sentence. My friend leaned forwards, his hand resting on his denim-covered knee. Astonished, he said, ‘Were your family working class?’

  Playfully, I tapped him on the chest, asked him if it was a shock to have a member of the proletariat in his living room. Laughing, I told him that I’d get my shovel and coat and go. I was not—am not—so foolish as to believe that he was spared childhood pain by virtue of inherited wealth, or through generations of education, or as a result o
f never having to think about where, or how, you might live; never having to think about what you might eat, never being at the mercy of someone else’s wealth. No. There was, I know, plenty of pain. But I was startled then, and startled now, by the discomfort of the conversation and by the way his response to me shifted afterwards. He was careful with me after that, but his surprise should not have been so unexpected. Like a snake shedding skin, there was nothing of my old self I wanted, nothing of this time of my life I’d carried with me. Like any good runaway, I’d kept my origin story perfectly hidden.

  But here, now, there was just this: my body, the view through the gap between breast and arm. A triangle of sky, and the shard of the A-frame slicing it. I whispered the words to myself: winch, shot, bow, A-frame. When I was in year five at Biddabah Public School, we had a school camp. Somehow, that year, there’d been one less house move, one less car crash, one less blowout. And, for the first time, there was enough money for the school camp. We stayed in a muddy camp site, watching rain sheet down for five days, sliding down the muddy banks, flinging mud at each other and shrieking with laughter. I didn’t feel alone, or strange. And we all slept together, all the girls in the whole class, in an A-frame cabin. We just called it the A-frame, and I loved it. A-frame. It meant only good things to me, only happiness. I whispered it again.

  I mouthed all the words, with the sun baking into my lips: winch, chain, tray, sonar, galley, cabin. These ordinary words that defined the world I was now contained by. How strange it was that the world stretched beyond the horizon.

  Above the deck, above the galley and the narrow cabin space, the A-frame loomed cathedral-like. It was the scaffold for our livelihood, the hold for the nets. At each shot, we winched up and watched the haul suspended from the frame, squirming bodies, mouths and eyes mashed against the net while I tried to look away, while I tried to think of another story, a better one. And then, the untie, and the drop and the frenzy.

  I sat up, tying my bikini—stolen from a small boutique in Woollahra, along with a leather anklet that I gave away—and looked up at them, Karl and Davey, laughing. Now, when I remember this day, I have to reach for it, though I remember the sensation of it so clearly. They come slowly into focus, as though I am watching them through water, or blinding sunlight. Voices first: Karl racketing and shouting up there on the frame, his brown legs loose as clouds. Davey, thick and funny, beside him, dared on. My own face is still in shadow, my own name still an invention. I can’t quite see myself, I kept myself so hidden.

  The skipper had stopped the engines, and the world stretched out beyond us. The container of the Ocean Thief was boiling me, suffocating me. Mick clambered out to the deck, miming an exaggerated clown shuffle, lifting his feet and making oooch aah noises; so desperate to be liked, so eager to please, that I had to look away.

  Karl climbed to the top of the frame hand over hand until he was a smear against the vivid sky, an electric line, drawn by a master. He called down, ‘Do you dare me?’ and I called that I did, of course I dared him, and he was in the air, limbs flying like streamers, before the words were out of my mouth, before the skipper had raised his hands in protest.

  ‘Jesus Christ and Mary! Get back on the boat, you fucktard.’ Even under pressure, Mick’s obscenities seemed learned, performed rather than felt.

  Water shot up into the air, and I held my hands out to get some of its cool sweetness. I could hear Karl calling me to come on in, to jump, just jump, and even skinny Davey stood on the lower tip of the frame, arms spread-eagled before he toppled, fell the forty feet down like a straight pin into the desperate blue, and bobbed up again calling me with a dare, a double dare, to jump in, to join in.

  I was slipping out of my denim cut-offs, kicking the battered sandals from my feet, when the hatch to the engine room lifted open and Frenchie peered up at me. He hated to be outside, with the harshness of this northern sun, the constant light. Even at night, when it was cooler and the night a deep purple, lit only by the stars and the moon, he scuttled away from the decks, preferring to be in the huddle of the galley and the dark noise of the engine room. I assumed he had a stash of whisky down there, because in spite of the fact that the Ocean Thief was a dry boat his eyes maintained the tinge of red on the rims, set off by a yellow on the whites, that identified him as a habitual drinker. Light was unpleasant to him; he blinked into it the way I imagined a mole might, scratching its way up from the cool loamy earth. He sniffed the air a little, said, ‘Why the swimming suit? This water is not for swimming in. It’s dangerous.’

  ‘Why are you on a boat, if you hate water and light so much?’ I stood on the long gunwale, the soles of my feet burning.

  Frenchie shook his head, as though dislodging water. ‘This is a good job. Good pay when the catch is good. Soon I’ll retire, anyway.’

  He did not say, This is a good place to hide. But now I know that’s what he meant.

  He stared down at the water, hand over his eyes to shield himself from the light, and said again, ‘It’s dangerous.’

  I said, ‘The boys are in there.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  It was a joke, of course it was, and so I laughed. Still laughing, I climbed hand over hand up the metal frame, with the chants of ‘jump, jump, jump’ ricocheting up at me. Rust peeled beneath my nails, and I was suddenly aware of the flimsiness of my bikini, of the way the back of it crept up, exposing my butt cheeks, the way the string barely held the triangles of fabric in place. From the edge of the frame, the water looked terrifyingly far away. But sunlight bounced off it and the crisp cool blue was so smooth, the shine of it inviting. Davey and Karl were still chanting from the water, and down on deck the skipper was still shouting. I grazed my back on the beam as I dropped down, feeling the air rush over me. The fall felt long, and my arms waved in the air as though I were trying to fly. Water smacked hard against me, then gave way. I dropped down, straight and true, and kept dropping until the water turned dark and cold and squeezed on my eyes. I felt the wet push itsblack thumb-balls in, the night you died. Did I think of ‘Five Bells’ then, or only later? Everything pressed on me and still I seemed to torpedo down, down. Somehow, finally, an inkling, a memory of my body, and I kicked, reached, swam for the circle of light and emerged gasping, victorious, brave like a boy.

  I don’t know why they came that day and not another. I suppose they were always there, shooting about under the surface. My lungs were still tingling with the leap into the sea when we dropped the nets in, trawling up and down the long trench of the gulf, dolphin pods flipping and dipping behind us. The laughter and hooting fell away from us once we brought the nets up: another catch full of everything but what we wanted, everything but money. Slime caught between my toes in the manky lining of my boots, the board shorts I’d borrowed from Karl flapped above my knees, and the catch was washed away down the chute. Schools of long thin fish, round silver fish, puffers, baitfish; everything but prawns. Davey put some Cold Chisel on and I didn’t have it in me to argue, so Jimmy Barnes hollered about flame trees and the girl he’d left behind, while I watched and waited, my raspberry-red gloves hovering above the tray, ready to grab the spiky stripes of the tiger prawns. Mick had relaxed, or perhaps abandoned hope for a time, and so the Ocean Thief was not powering through the water at speed and we waited on deck, legs akimbo, gloved hands hovering, fighting over the grabbing of the odd single prawn. I thought about my ticket out of there, and the money I needed to get it, and I watched the water wash the baitfish down the tray and into the chute, spitting them back into the sea.

  In photos of English summers, there were always meadows or woods, blanketed with small flowers: bluebells, daisies, buttercups. Here, that meadow was the wide azure expanse of the Arafura Sea, and the flowers were dead fish, floating on their sides, scales sparkling in the sun. Watching the diamonds of light glinting you’d think they were life; you’d think they were nothing but beauty. Flowers spread out for a princess.

  Mick noticed them first. Up the
re in the wheelhouse, he could see for miles, scanning to the horizon, watching the light shift and change. He’d watched the spread of fish, the blanket of dead sea life, hauled up from the depths, left to dry in the air and then thrown back as waste. This was what we did, what we were. Mick thought nothing about the fish, thought only about the catch, the money that he wasn’t bringing in. He thought about the uncle who owned the fleet, the uncle who had promised him a chance, and how spectacularly he was managing to screw it up with his thinning catch, his disobedient engineer, his incompetent deckhands. He didn’t think about sharks until he saw them. On the periphery at first, the usual scattering of reef sharks, come for the feast. Then, the saw-tooth sharks, mouths open like cartoons of Jaws, their great curved heads making half-moons as they skimmed the fish, barely rippling the water. By the time he hollered to us to get to the bow, to come and look, there were scores of them: hammerheads, grey nurses, white pointers, tiger sharks. Oblivious to us and to each other, they skimmed back and forth, forming a spectacular community, a city of sharks. Reef sharks dipped under and up, snatching the small bait trails. Blacktips flipped beneath the bellies of indifferent bull sharks and threshers, their dorsal fins making smooth zigzags through the water. I tried to count but they kept moving and there were so many of them. I stopped counting at forty-two. Mick took the cigarette out of his mouth, a flicker of ash making a dandruff-sized spot on his beard until the wind picked it up. ‘See why I wasn’t keen on your jumping game today?’ He stubbed the cigarette out, flicked the butt to the sharks. ‘They’re always there.’

  I kept my eyes on the water. ‘Everything has to eat, Mick.’

  He nodded. ‘But I don’t want to be their food. And I don’t want to have to go into Darwin minus a crew member.’

  Behind him, Karl’s voice cut across the dusk. ‘They’re beautiful.’