Look pretty, a friend said, but not too pretty. I didn’t want to look pretty at all, I wanted to scrub myself away. I scraped my hair back into a tight bun. Sleepless for days, my face was puffy, my skin spotty. I wore no make-up. Not too pretty, or not pretty enough.
The friend who told me to look pretty (but not too pretty) was raped when a kid—that was what they called him, although he was twenty-two—broke into her house one morning, looking for cash, but he found her instead.
Last year I read Lucky, Alice Sebold’s memoir. When she describes her brutal rape, she adds that she was a virgin. And later, the cops report that she was a good girl. This week, I read another report of a recent sexual assault. This was a girl, the report trumpeted, who was innocent, who did not bring this on in any way, who had no cause to expect such a thing. A good girl. In contrast, on the same day there was a story about a thirteen-year-old girl, not a good girl. A runaway, with a twenty-year-old man who, the paper reported, ‘had a sexual relationship’ with her. You cannot rape a girl who is not a good girl, it seems. Even if she is a child.
I was not a good girl. So perhaps this, all this—the courtroom, the barrister glaring at me, the waiting faces—is what I have a right to expect. If a girl lies and steals and sleeps with people she does not love, what can she expect from the world? What should she expect?
My mother does not come with me to the first day or the second of the trial. I don’t want her to. This has always been a marker of my life. In primary school, friends have mothers and fathers sitting in the audience at Easter hat parades, or assemblies. My mother, working shift work, strained and stressed, is never at these events. Once, a sister comes to an Easter hat parade; the other kids cluster around her, asking me if she is my mother.
My mother works late at night and early in the morning, driving forty minutes each way around the lake, dressed in her nurse’s aide uniform. When she comes home, she is sad and lonely and tired and broke. When she is not lying awake at night worrying about how to pay the bills, or who will save her, she is working. When she is not working, she is exhausted. And when she is any of these things, she goes to bed, burrowing beneath the covers, whispering that she cannot cope, so could we please just leave her alone for a little while?
In year six, when I receive the little printed card—gold-embossed—that announces me dux of the year, I hold it tightly in my hand, gazing at it alone. With no audience for my achievement, I hoard a secret pleasure, guard a private pride.
And now, I do not know how to ask for support, how to ask for someone to sit with me, to hold my hand and to let me be a child. Although I am not a good girl, I long for comfort. There is no one to tell me that it doesn’t look good for me to have no one there to support me. What am I, a waif? Or a girl so wicked that she has no family left to care for her? I think only about what I need to do to shut myself down.
And also, I am ashamed.
When I stumbled into the police station and the horse-faced sergeant told me, wagging his finger, how drunk I was, I knew that he was right. I knew that his subtext—that I should not be believed because I had lost count of how much I’d had to drink—was right. I am, now, in this courtroom, ashamed to be the girl that I am, ashamed to be confronted with my own confusion. After that first time, I sit outside the courtroom when he speaks. I can’t bear to listen to him, can’t bear to hear them discussing me—my drunkenness, my underpants, my vagina. Later, much later, I understand that this too will work against me.
I sit outside the court on a long wooden bench. Cool to the touch, the wood is smooth, the tiled floor echoing footsteps, amplifying sound. After a few minutes, a wigged barrister scuttles out of a courtroom at the end of a corridor, robe billowing. Papers are cradled to his chest and, as I lift my head to nod at him, the papers slip from his grasp. Black cloth, the trim of his robe, makes a dark cloud behind him as he kneels, muttering under his breath, gathering the papers back to his embrace. When he stands, he shakes his head at me, as though I am the cause of his clumsiness. Blame, in life and in law, can seem unreasonably hard to apportion.
I step back into the courtroom when they call the other taxi driver—Sid—to the stand. ‘She was on the road,’ he said, ‘shouting, blood on her legs, her clothes half trailing behind her.’ I sit in the gallery while he is speaking, watching the considered way he moves his hands on the lip of the witness box.
The crown prosecutor asks, ‘Can you see the young woman you picked up?’
‘Yes.’ And he points to me, shaking in the gallery.
Later, the defending prosecutor says, ‘When you picked this—girl—up, you say she was distressed, yes?’
‘Yes,’ the man says. ‘I don’t say it. She was distressed. That’s fact.’
The barrister is silky-smooth. Dark hair peeps out from under his wig. His eyebrows are tidy, as though waxed or trimmed; his teeth are white and straight. Long fingers—a pianist’s fingers—flick at the bow on his gown. Slowly, he turns, walks towards the dock. ‘How did you perceive this distress?’
Sid blows air out, a thin whistle. ‘When someone is distressed, it’s bloody obvious, isn’t it?’
The barrister raises his trimmed, brushed eyebrows. The judge leans towards the dock, says, ‘Language.’ As though Sid is a toddler or a primary school child presenting his end-of-term speech.
‘Perhaps so.’ The barrister smiles without showing his teeth. ‘But indulge me.’
‘She was crying. Her make-up was smeared. She was half in and half out of her clothes. She had blood on her legs. She was standing in the middle of the road waving her arms. Is that bloody distressed enough for you?’
This man. I want to find him, now. I want to thank him.
The barrister smiles again. ‘Would it be reasonable to suggest that the complainant was very drunk?’
‘I don’t—’
‘And that many of the signs you suggest—dishevelment, disorientation, personal abandon—that these are also signs of a significant level of intoxication?’
I leave the courtroom, the door thudding behind me. Outside, in the cool corridor, I count the tiles, and then I walk up and down the length of them, listening to the echo of my own footsteps.
What the taxi driver who picked me up says is this. He stopped on the road, leaving his headlights on. Lit up, I was a waving lantern, arms above my head. Unsure of what I was, he approached slowly, getting out of his taxi, holding his hands out in front of him. Palms up, as though I were a wild animal, cornered and dangerous in its fear.
This is what I remember of my first kiss.
The boy’s name is Steven, that’s what he tells me. The dark has started to drift over the gully behind our new house, and I am roaming like a free girl through the grass. Steven is there from nowhere, walking beside me. Where does he come from? His pretty face is flushed in the cool air, his hair wispy brown, so fine it makes me want to touch it. On the first day of knowing him, he whispers to me, ‘Do you want to see a rude word?’ I do, I do want to see a rude word, so badly that the thrill of it threatens to swim up through my toes and drown me. It’s very quiet and he takes my hand.
The streets of Speers Point are busier than the streets of Boolaroo, although they are emptier, not having my dad in them. His absence fills the whole of the house, the whole of the town. But this is a town just for a little while, not to stay. Until we find another place, until we find our feet.
Outside on the street, there is a telegraph pole, dark at the bottom and pale at the top, so that it looks like it is still a tree, still what it always was, only with someone sticking wires at the top. We whisper as we get closer to the terrible word. We stop respectfully a few feet from the pole and Steven silently and solemnly points to the word, painted there on the pole for everyone to see. I know words, I can read them, and I can read this word: Dick. I run my hand down the pole. The word Dick is right beneath my skin and my face burns with its charge.
‘When did you first notice it?’ I ask. I have heard p
eople on television say ‘When did you notice this?’ instead of ‘When did you see it?’ and I like the sound of it.
‘It’s always been here.’
I say, ‘The person who wrote it will get in enormous trouble.’
Enormous is a word I am trying out.
Steven steps away from the pole. ‘Do you think so?’
I say, ‘Well, no one will ever discover who put it there. Anyway, it’s always been there, probably.’
Discover is another word I have noticed. On Adventure Island Miser Meanie worked hard to discover who took his sweets. (I can tell you: it was him! He hid them himself and then forgot!)
Steven repeats after me: ‘No one will discover it.’
‘No,’ I say. ‘They never will.’
And then he says, ‘Do you want to kiss?’
‘Yes,’ I say, because I do want to kiss. I think that we will stand right there, in the middle of the empty field between our new house and the Italians, but we don’t. Steven does not hold my hand, but we walk next to each other, carefully not touching, carefully not looking at each other, and we place our feet carefully on the ground. There are no more words to speak so we are quiet, listening to the distance of the cars.
Near the mandarin tree, there’s a soft clearing in the grass. Steven lies down there and looks up at me with his wispy brown hair and his speckled brown eyes and he says, ‘We have to lie down.’
‘To kiss?’
‘Yes, that’s what they do.’
What who does? But I am already lying beside him, my lips puckering, my arm about his head. His lips are soft, and a little bit of dribble falls from his mouth into mine. I like the feeling of his soft lips and the leafy smell of his breath. I like the weight of him, his skinny arms digging into my ribs. After the kiss we walk back to the road, watching our feet on the grass.
Later that year, the boy next door invites me over. After I have said that no I would not like to F-U-C-K, he puts his soft thing inside my pants anyway, while I stand obediently, staring at the window, and the kookaburra perches on the wire, laughing.
We should have pulled the nets up when the storm started.
Bonaparte was as empty as Carpentaria. Worse. Along the exposed coast, the winds had buffeted our little boat, slamming waves against the hull. We pitched one way then the other, angling so sharply that the booms on either side were in the water. We motored through the night in a rocky sea, taking turns to sleep and turns to hold the watch with the skipper. During my sleep shifts, I held my hand against the bunk, trying to imagine that the rise and fall was comforting, was a rocking chair, a womb. This was the gift of all those books, all those years of making things up: I could imagine, I could pretend my way out of fear.
Wind still roared about us on the first day, and the second, after we got to the gulf, and our nets twice came up as good as empty. And on the third day the wind strengthened its roar, the water turned a deeper dark. No glorious sunset shifted across the sky, just a grey palette, a rattling of thunder. Karl looked up at the sky, sniffing the air, and called up to Mick in the wheelhouse, ‘We shouldn’t shoot. It’s going to turn bad.’ He corrected himself. ‘Worse.’
Mick clambered out, standing with legs wide on the tray, hands on his hips, eyes narrowed while he followed Karl’s gaze. Karl waited, and then added, ‘It looks like it’ll be rough, skipper. What do you reckon?’
Mick shook his head and said, ‘We can’t afford to miss a catch, we’re already down. At this rate, we’ll go back owing money and I’ve promised my missus we can buy a house.’
Karl looked out to the darkening horizon, the thick clouds clumping. Thunder boomed somewhere, a distance away. ‘You sure?’
Mick nodded. ‘I’m absolutely certain. Shoot away.’
Sliding across the deck, rain slapping into our faces, we hauled the nets up and heaved at the ropes, swung them out and down, watching them churn in the waves. The boards held for a moment then stretched apart until the weight of water—and of the boards—dragged the nets down. We huddled in the galley, too nervous to sleep, while thunder escalated around us and Karl told stories of stupid skippers he had known, or known of, before now; the grisly ends they had come to.
First, we heard the rain battering down, then the thunder coming closer, and then the shrieking. High, constant, like a rolling wave; like a human scream, a series of human screams. We ran out on deck, sliding and shouting, unsure of what we’d find, what we could do. There were scores of them, bills snapping up and beneath, silver gleams of backs caught in the snatches of light from the boat. Dolphins trailing the nets, screeching. More and more of them came, the beaks open, the shrieking unbearable. We peered into the dark pulp of the nets while Mick shouted at us to winch up, get the fucking nets up, sure that we’d caught a dolphin in there. Even in those wild days in the gulf, when the laws were lax and loosely policed—even then, to catch a dolphin, to drown it in a net, would not be forgiven.
We tried to pull up, but at each point the nets, heaving and thrashing in the white-capped sea, sagged and dropped. I turned the winch while Karl peered out at the boards, thrashing uselessly, holding the nets down. He shouted across the wind, ‘The boards are broken. Drop the winch.’
I couldn’t hear him properly, so I kept turning. He ran at me then, skidding a little on the wet deck, shouting louder. ‘Stop fucking winching! If we pull up in this, while the boards are broken, it will fricken tip us.’
‘What do we do?’ I kept my hand on the winch to keep myself steady.
‘Fix them. We have to fix them.’
I looked at the white water, at the rolling booms, and I looked back at Karl. He had already stepped out of his gumboots. He nodded at my own boots, shouted, ‘You’ll have to come out on the boom with me. I need the light.’
I followed him out on the boom, gripping the narrow rail, trying not to look down.
My bare feet curved, my toes gripping the narrow width of the boom holding me unsteadily as the boat lurched. Following Karl’s instructions, I’d hooked my arms over the narrow band that formed a sort of rail above the boom. Mouth dry, terror at the back of my throat, I leaned forwards, clutching a Dolphin torch in one hand, the beam rising and falling as the wooden boards below me slapped up and down with the slide of the ocean. Waves smacked against the boards with the force of a punch. The metal cut into the softness of my armpits. Framed by the black of the water snapping at his feet, Karl’s face flashed in and out of the light. His eyes wide, white; I couldn’t let myself notice if what I saw there was fear. If I saw fear in him, I would be lost.
And so, instead of squinting through the spray to the dark and wild shadow of Karl’s face, I peered down at my hands, at the messy beam of the torch. The belt of tools at my waist dug into me, the handle of a metal tool—a spanner? a wrench?—stabbing into the flesh at my hip, a relief from the pressure of the boom across my belly. Karl shouted up at me, but his words were whipped away. Ack. Asser. Ick. Uck.
It was all noise, a wash and a roar of sound: Karl’s snippets, half-words that disappeared into the storm; the punch-roar of the waves; Davey on deck calling sorrysorrysorry; the skipper behind him fist-shaking, shouting; my own bloody heart, the thudding of it.
Karl raised his face again as another wave rose. ‘The screw.’ A wave interrupted. ‘Iver. Need. Mash.’
Folding myself in two, I leaned further down, a screwdriver dangling from my hand. Karl reached up, but not close enough. Each wave jerked at the heavy nets, lurching the boat this way and that. My foot lifted off the boom, while my arms gripped tighter. On the deck behind me, Davey shouted a warning. The boom lifted then fell and the boards smashed towards me. The torch dropped from my hand just as another wall of water surged, pounding into my face, my eyes, until I was blinded, only feeling the turn of metal beneath me. I grabbed at something near, while the wall of the world—dark, impenetrable—came closer. Terns screeched, counterpointing the shrieking of the dolphins below and the rattling inside my skull, a bas
s reverberation. Karl’s voice sounded below me, a call, a warning, and then there was the clang of the chains and a sudden smack to my face. The thickness of blood then, and an unexpected, momentary blindness.
It was soundless for a moment—a second? A slice of a second?—and so I must have passed out. When I blinked back to consciousness, I was doubled forwards, my arms linked over the rail which had held me upright and prevented me tumbling from the boom into the water. Blood, sticky and sweet, was thick on my face, in my mouth. Across the water a sheet of lightning flashed the sky on, then off, and both Davey and Mick were shouting at us to get in, get off the fucking metal boom, there’s lightning, just leave it, get the fuck in. Another flash, and Karl hauled himself up next to me, shouting at me to move, to get in, to hurry the fuck up. Rain slapped into my eyes, making my hands slip. When we made it to the deck, there was another lurch and we fell inside the galley: blood on my face, my hands, my teeth.
I trembled all through the night, with the nets in the water ready to drag us under, and the cracking of thunder like a series of punches outside. All night, the storm raged while our nets dragged, each wave and crash escalating the risk of capsize. All night, we took turns with the skipper in the wheelhouse, holding tight, hoping for the best, waiting for the calm to come.
Solid ground was too unyielding. My legs buckled and folded on the carpet, unable to connect properly to the solid floor of the Darwin hotel lobby. I had become used to a constantly moving surface. Now, the earth felt wrong: too settled, too solid, too stable. How quickly we become accustomed to our own circumstances; how easily, how terribly, we adapt. Frogs boiling, lobsters turning pink. As a child, I was accustomed to turmoil and uncertainty. It will be years before I adapt to happiness, to love; years before I stop craving noise, chaos, misery.
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