Everything in its right place

by Tobias McCorkell

  Her body was long, lithe. I took in her skin, again. It was brown and reminded me of creek water in the daytime when the sun hit it directly, how it became translucent and you could make out the sediment at the bottom. It made me feel tranquil, grounded. Ellie connected me to where I was from. She was the neighbourhood. She was nothing like the princesses south of the river. They made me nervous as hell to be around. The way they spoke and acted set me on edge and I found myself being overly polite with them during the group activities my college organised with our sister school. I assumed they were better than me. It was striking just how divvied up the world was. But I didn’t feel flawed with Ellie. I felt comfortable, could talk how I liked, not get judged. She understood my context, because to a greater or lesser extent it was her own. You either understood or you didn’t.

  Ellie was on me, in her knickers, her breathing mass of flesh sitting across my body on the bed, kissing into me, pulling me into her. It was terrifying, electric. I didn’t really know what to do. All those pornos Dougie and I had watched hadn’t adequately prepped me for first contact. Where are the other five blokes shouting abuse?

  ‘Take off your boxers,’ she instructed.

  I did. She gave this funny little look and hopped on her knees and put me in her mouth, but after all my years of frequent wanking, and what with my nervousness, I was pretty numb to the pleasure. Mostly it was all just panic as I thought about the consequences, fretting over what this meant. Things had to mean something, didn’t they? And there were always consequences.

  ‘You taste good,’ she said.

  ‘Uh-huh. Um, cheers.’

  My heart was beating heavily, as if someone or something was rapping on it, and that rapping quickly became booming, angry fist-pounding, and I realised who it must be. I knew it! It was God, come down to smite me.

  ‘Come here.’ Ellie motioned to the side of the bed, and I lay back. When she stood up, she slipped off her knickers. Stoned, I studied her form for that brief moment before she straddled me. Except for Mum’s, hers was the only vagina I’d seen in the real, and it didn’t completely make sense to me. From the outside, it looked closed. But then she was getting on top of me and things fell into place.

  ‘Um, what about, like, ah, protection, or whatever?’ I said.

  ‘It’s okay. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Oh, awright.’

  I was numb and worried, and it felt only a quarter as good as what I’d expected. But that wasn’t really the point – the dick and pussy bit wasn’t the thrill. It was looking in her eyes, and the things she said, and how it all felt inside. I liked Ellie heaps. I cared about the chick, and she cared enough to do this both to and for me. That was the good bit, the really good bit. The pornos only dealt with the dick and pussy bit.

  ‘Are ya gunna come? I’m gunna come,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

  She came. I didn’t come with her. It took a while. We rolled about a lot. I tried a couple angles and that was interesting. It felt better when I was behind her. She liked that too. I kept it up for a good while and concentrated hard. And then I came. Not with her. Or for her. Just came.

  ‘Hey, thanks for that,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘You don’t need to thank me.’

  ‘Well, why not? It’s polite, isn’t it?’

  ‘You’re a strange fish, Ford.’

  ‘Well, whatever.’

  She giggled.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘are you awright? I mean, ya know, really?’

  Ellie looked at me, hard. It was like nobody’d ever asked her that question before. ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Fuck, Ellie, I dunno. I mean, you’re great, ya know. I’m just asking.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘Okay.’

  We lay together in silence for a bit and then she got up and rolled a spliff and lay back down and we passed it back and forth.

  ‘Hey,’ I said, ‘one last question, yeah?’

  She laughed. ‘What now?’

  ‘Do ya need me to, like, buy you the morning-after pill or whatever?’

  ‘Ew, gross.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are a strange fish, mate.’

  ‘What? I’m just asking. Why’s everything I say wrong?’

  ‘It’s not wrong, well … it’s not wrong, it’s just a bit weird.’

  ‘Well, I can. I’ve been working and you shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘You do realise nobody talks the way you do.’

  ‘Well, fuck it then.’

  ‘Ford, it’s fine. I can take care of myself. But … thanks. You’re nice, actually.’

  ‘Jeez, thanks! I always wanted to be nice.’

  ‘It’s refreshing. Honest.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek. I felt like I’d just fucked my sister. Sweet little brother Ford. A nice boy.

  When I was leaving, we stood awkwardly in the doorway together.

  Something was on my chest, and I just had to get it off. ‘Ya know, Ellie, when you say nobody’s ever talked to you the way I do … what you mean is nobody’s ever given a shit about you before. Ya don’t have to put up with that.’ I stared at her a second too long.

  Something about my words had cut her. ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘don’t look at me like that.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re so intense, Ford.’

  ‘I know. But it’s true, Ellie. Ya don’t have to.’

  ‘I’m not some fucken lost puppy.’

  I’d barely edged outside the door when she shut it, firmly. I knew she’d never root me again. I’d probably never be able to look her in the eye again either.

  As I left Ellie’s front yard, I chuckled at the gnome in the garden bed. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was so quaint and cliched, like the rest of her house; it didn’t pair with what had just gone on.

  I unlatched the front gate and shut it behind me. Ellie’s street seemed to stretch on forever in the afternoon sun, and a magpie was carolling in a gum tree as I walked away.

  Fore!

  On Friday night, after yet another tense dinner over frozen pizzas with Noonie, Pop and Mum, I called Dougie up and we rode round to meet by a wind-damaged tree next to the Coburg Station underpass. Beneath its branches, cigarette butts had accumulated in strange, triangular patterns of brown and white and grey and black – beautiful urban art born out of the discarded remnants of bad habits.

  My thirst for booze was soaring, and despite what I’d told myself – that I wanted to catch up with Doug, to hang, to get pissed – I’d really called him up because I wanted to brag to someone about having lost my virginity. I’d been sitting on the information for over twenty-four hours when we crossed the carpark to the Turk’s and loaded up on the usual bottle of Beam, plus some longnecks of bitter, seeing as I was in a celebratory mood.

  When I walked in, the Turk shot his hands into the sky and cried, ‘Ah, my friend! You are back again!’ The old man was already pulling a bottle off the dusty shelf behind him. He proceeded to wrap it in a brown paper bag, giving it a quick, exaggerated twist at the top – with that flourish, he turned the grim bag into a gift. He did likewise with the beers after I’d taken them out the fridge and placed them on the counter. ‘So much colour, my friend. Is good to see you. Such a bright boy, very bright boy.’ He gestured at my head as always, smiling like the recently cured at Lourdes.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, putting the cash in his palm.

  ‘What you do tonight, my friend?’

  ‘Dunno, man. Just gunna get loaded, I reckon. Fuck about a bit.’

  ‘Ah, you drink too much you no be play football en-more.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. ‘But we won the premiership this season, so I wouldn’t worry.’

  ‘Yes, I hear. Everyone very excited for you.’ He pumped his fists for the victory. ‘But who can blame? You like the bourbon, I know. I know this. Me, too. I love it, mate.’

  ‘Thanks, man,’ I said, making to walk out. ‘See ya next time, yeah?’


  ‘Yes, you know I be here. Ah! So bright! That colour, my god!’

  ‘He go on about your hair again?’ asked Doug, after I’d parted the fly-strips and was stepping back outside.

  ‘Whaddaya think?’

  ‘I still reckon he’s bent for ya.’

  I laughed. ‘Where ya wanna go?’

  ‘Playground?’

  ‘Nah, somewhere else, I reckon.’

  ‘Could go down the creek,’ said Doug. Then, ‘Oh, wait! Shit! I’ve got a great idea! Let’s go to the playground first, drink the brews, then we’ll do something real good.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Surprise. But we gotta wait till it gets dark, and I gotta go home real quick to grab some stuff. It’ll be fun, trust me.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We rode round to the playground and drank the brews. It got dark quick, as we sat in the tunnel talking rubbish. Doug went home and I waited for him. When he returned, he was wearing a sports bag like a backpack, his arms fitted through the little handles. The big black rectangle of the bag went up past his head in one direction and sat awkwardly on the back of his seat, almost touching the rear tyre of his bike.

  ‘What the fuck are ya doing?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s ride over to Glennie Hill.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Come on. I’ll show ya why in a bit.’

  Glendale Hill was the secondary school down near Pentridge Prison, what was now Pentridge Village. The old bluestone walls of the gaol and the newly refurbished wing of the local high school stood opposite each other across a large reserve. It was technically public property, but the reserve doubled as Glendale Hill’s home footy oval. With the season over, the goalposts had been taken down, and what was left was grass that never drained off, so that in patches it was too swampy to ride through.

  Doug and I made our way out into the middle and set ourselves up in a dry spot thirty metres or so from the school’s west-facing wing. As Dougie fiddled with his sports bag, I looked out across the park to the Village, where I could make out the silhouettes of cranes and bulldozers and ditch-diggers, still and cold and silent and steely, glinting in the moonlight. The machinery had been motionless for months. After the developers had erected the first few homes within the prison walls – the beginnings of what they’d envisioned as Coburg’s first lush gated community – they were made aware of the fact that nobody was anywhere near as keen to opt into this vision of the future upon the grounds of the state’s most notorious prison.

  Pentridge was the place, after all, where Chopper Read had lopped off his ears to get out of H division, where the Painters and Dockers Union had put contracts on inmates’ heads, where the last man hanged in Victoria had been executed and buried. With its long, dark history, who in fuck would’ve wanted to settle into a two-bedroom/one-bath where every morning the heritage-listed walls, replete with crushed glass and security turrets, would remind them of a world of shivs, shower blocks and seclusion?

  But within my neighbourhood, an inordinate amount of pride still circled Pentridge – it wasn’t any prison, it was ‘Coburg College’, the ‘Bluestone College’, the ‘College of Knowledge’, and its pupils some of the hardest and longest-serving inmates in the country. In the time after it’d stopped operating as a correctional institution near the turn of the millennium, locals had paid to walk through the cells on history tours run by the local council. Pop and Ned Jackett and a lot of the fathers I knew considered the building of Jika Jika – the maximum security ‘gaol within a gaol’ – to be an architectural masterstroke.

  In his oversized sports bag, Dougie had brought some of Ned’s antique purchases: three or four golf clubs, tees, and what must easily have been a hundred balls of assorted brands and colours, which Mr Jackett had bought from a vendor at the Show Grounds and which Dougie poured out onto the lawn from a black bin-liner.

  He pressed two tees into the earth about a metre apart, before handing me one of the clubs. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Bet ya can’t hit any of those windows.’

  I looked at the school building. I’d never played golf before, but neither of us had.

  ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘Bet I hit one before you.’

  Doug laughed and kicked a bunch of balls in my direction.For hours we drove the dotted spheres of rubber and plastic at the school’s windows, between taking mouthfuls of bourbon, passing the bottle back and forth. Each of us laughed at the other’s ineptitude, especially when our clubs would thwack against both ball and tee and we would tear up clumps of grass, the ball splattering forward weakly for a short distance.

  Still, every time we teed off we were sure to yell ‘Fore!’ just like you were supposed to. With time our drives got rangy and, on a couple of them, our accuracy shored up as well. Later still, in a state of supreme confidence and not yet total inebriation, we managed to smash a couple holes in a second-storey windowpane.

  ‘How’s that!’ Dougie cried, flexing his hand toward his face like Lleyton Hewitt.

  When all the balls were lost in the dark, we put away the clubs and rode closer to the school, where we admired our handiwork while sitting beneath the windsail. In the moonlight the shimmering pane of glass, disfigured by several golf ball-sized pockmarks, looked more like a silvery slice of Swiss cheese than a broken window.

  We kept up our drinking until the bottle was nearly dry and my news had reached the tip of my tongue. I knew I probably shouldn’t say it, but Dougie was a mate. I’d known him since kindergarten.

  ‘So, I got some big news,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. Well …’ I hesitated. Thinking it might be more palatable to bury it amongst a lame show of bullshit bravado, I said, ‘Off the V plates now.’

  ‘Bullshit. Since when?’

  ‘Ah, sometime in the last week.’

  ‘Fuck off. Who with?’

  ‘I can’t say.’

  ‘Argh. Fuck off. You didn’t fuck anyone.’

  ‘Well, think what ya want then.’

  ‘Come on. Who with then?’

  ‘I really shouldn’t say.’

  ‘If you’re not gunna say, then it musn’t have happened.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Awright. But ya gotta promise not to say.’

  ‘Who’m I gunna tell?’

  ‘You can’t tell anyone. You’ve gotta swear.’

  ‘Awright. I swear then. Cross my heart and hope to die. On me mum’s life. All that shit.’

  ‘Awright, awright. Well, look, yeah? I, ah, ended up hooking up with Ellie.’

  Doug’s face turned funny. It wasn’t the reaction I’d expected, though I hadn’t been sure what to expect. But this wasn’t it. And the mistake I’d known I was in the process of making, had been on the cusp of making all night, was conveyed to me in that funny look.

  ‘I hope that isn’t true,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mate, why do ya think? That’s Moose’s chick. Plus, Ellie’s a crazy fucken slut anyway. I told ya to watch it.’

  ‘She’s not,’ I said. ‘She’s really nice. And anyway, it’s not like he didn’t bring it on himself.’

  Doug scoffed. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You know.’

  He didn’t say anything. He knew.

  We didn’t speak for a long while, not until we’d finished off the bottle and were going our separate ways, and then it was only quick and surly goodbyes.

  As I staggered home, wheeling my bike, I was overcome with laughter. My legs felt weightless, my whole body did, and I couldn’t wrap my mind around who was in charge of me, who was getting each leg to stride out in front of the other. Because if I was really in control, I wouldn’t be walking home – I’d be walking in any other direction.

  Tears welled in my eyes. I laughed, guffawed, cackled, roared, every step of the way back to The Compound. I’m a marionette, I thought. Just a fucken marionette.r />
  And yes, I’ve made a horrible mistake.

  Strike!

  I was hungover Saturday morning after the golfing shenanigans, when Dad came round to pick me up. With the footy season over, I’d gone back to forfeiting my weekends to him and Craig and their dull interests and obnoxious elocution lessons.

  Unusually, when Dad and I had walked up the driveway and were on the nature strip, I found that Craig’s car was parked on my street: a long white Fairlane from the funeral home with tinted windows and the sky-blue parlour logo on the front doors. The car was used in funeral processions to follow the hearse, and inside was an ocean of luxuriously soft black leather where families did their crying and considered whether or not their loved one, lying stiff and covered with make-up one car-length ahead, would make it into the afterlife.

  Today Craig was behind the wheel, and Joel was in the back seat. I climbed in to sit beside him. He had on this heavy, hangdog look, focused down at his thumbs in his lap. His Globes were now busted at the sides, and the heels of his jeans were worn through. I couldn’t understand why Dad and Craig didn’t just buy him a new pair. If they’d offered, why would Joel turn them down?

  ‘Hey, man,’ I said.

  ‘What’s up?’ he muttered and forced a smile.

  ‘We were thinking we’d go to the pub for lunch,’ said Dad. ‘That sound awright, Mr Motor?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, listening to my father fiddle with the radio dial, setting it to Gold FM before falling back into a conversation with Craig. I leaned across the leather partition in back and whispered, ‘What the fuck’s up? Ya right?’

  ‘Yeah, man. I’m good. Just some shit. That’s all,’ said Joel.

  ‘They know?’ I asked, nodding toward the bozos in the front seats.

  ‘They fucken know everything, man.’