The shed in which I set up headquarters that summer was dim, full of disused gardening tools and household junk. It had been built thirty years earlier by the two Italian families who at that time owned our place and the adjacent Dixon property. The Italians were inveterate gardeners and they shared the shed among their clans. Their children roamed freely between the backyards and, to facilitate this, they had cut into the wall of the shed a low door – at most a metre high – that opened straight into the shady back corner of the Dixon place.
The shed reeked pleasantly of fertiliser and kerosene. It contained a long, scarred workbench, several dilapidated bikes, an old cat bed, a dozen boxes in various stages of collapse, and countless tins of screws and nails. The hateful brace I used to wear hung like a torture device from a hook; the sight of it filled me with panic, like an alarm reverberating in a distant chamber of my heart. I tidied the shed to improve the vantage point from which to admire Claire. With some effort, I arranged a little nest of cushions on the bench. My parents thought I had taken up woodwork and to supplement this misconception I scattered around the place random projects my brother had left unfinished over the years: a billycart, some bookshelves.
‘I’ve started building a billycart,’ I told my mother one night, although I had not a clue about constructing such a thing, nor could I see any reason for one.
‘That’s nice,’ she said, staring vaguely through the kitchen window. Then, after a short silence: ‘What did you say, dear?’
‘A billycart.’
She looked at me. ‘Do you think that’s wise? With, you know . . .’
My mother usually avoided mentioning my deformity and vacillated between maudlin fretting (coming into my room late at night, weeping drunkenly when she thought I was asleep) and manic optimism (‘It doesn’t mean you can’t do whatever you want, you know!’).
‘I’ll be okay, Mum,’ I said.
She seemed to think about this for some time. ‘Of course you will,’ she said at last, although the pilotless yacht of her thoughts had drifted on.
My parents both worked until quite late and, although I was on school holidays, I didn’t venture out much on my own; the stares and occasional abuse from passing cars were often barely noticeable but, like pebbles, agglomerated into a substantial burden; one such weight was enough.
Instead, I took the opportunity to prowl through our house, watching the doltish mannequins of daytime TV. Of course I also spied on Claire, who spent most days beside the pool, where she dozed or read The Shining as her fingers traced idle patterns in the coconut oil glistening on her belly. Circles, figure eights, tiny squiggles. She played Pink Floyd on her tape deck. Every so often she would slide into the pool and swim a few laps with her sunglasses perched on her nose. Afterwards, she sat on the edge and wrung water from her hair with a look (eyes part-closed, thoughtful smile) of supreme, private pleasure.
Claire’s own parents were rarely home during the day, but one afternoon, with a distinct chill, I noticed her father observing her from their kitchen window. Mr Dixon was tall and his face was pinched and gloomy, like that of a fallen priest. He worked in an office in the city. Claire was lying on a lime-green lilo in the water, eyes closed, oblivious to his intense gaze. It was an unsettling scene and I had the disconcerting impression that each of them had unwittingly summoned the other from a nightmare or dream. I don’t know how long he had been there when I saw him, but he stood unmoving for at least twenty minutes before his pale face withdrew from sight, as if sinking beneath its own dark waters.
Two or three nights later, my parents were engaged in one of their interminable arguments and, in an effort to remove myself from earshot, I ventured down to the shed. It was after dark, still hot and sticky. As I pushed open the door and switched on the light, Claire slid from the bench where she had obviously been sitting. I gasped, emitting an ugly little grunt of surprise. She looked startled, a marsupial caught in torchlight. Her eyes were red.
‘Shit,’ she said as she crouched to pick up a half-smoked cigarette from the floor.
I stared at her, she stared back and, in that momentary silence, I heard my mother yelling some obscenity at my father. I shut my eyes in embarrassment and when I opened them again, Claire was standing in front of me.
‘Here you go,’ she said, holding up the still-burning end of her Winfield Blue. ‘This’ll make you feel better.’
I took a shallow drag of the cigarette and handed it back to her. She was wearing a thin, Indian-style orange shirt and denim shorts. She was more freckled than I remembered and her eyes were a crystalline blue, as if they had absorbed the tint of the pool water in which she had been spending so much time. Even with a flake of sunburn curling on her nose, she was very beautiful. I tried not to look too closely because, with a face and body such as mine, almost any glance is imbued with defiance or lust.
My parents’ voices faded away as they moved to the front of the house. This was how it usually went: my father skulking off as my mother followed him down the hall. Soon, he would drive away, most likely not reappearing until tomorrow, even the day after, with offerings of jewellery or perfume for my mother. So predictable, so tiresome.
Claire finished the cigarette, dropped it to the floor and ground it beneath her sandal. ‘My parents fight all the time, too,’ she said eventually.
‘What about?’ I asked.
‘Sometimes I’d like to kill him,’ she continued, apparently having not heard my question.
‘Who?’ I asked.
She wound a strand of hair behind her ear, considered me; her expression was very grave and, for a second, she appeared on the verge of revealing something. But instead she nodded towards the shed window. ‘I didn’t know you could see our pool from here. Why are there cushions on the bench?’
Mortified, I said nothing, merely gazed at the dirt floor. At that moment I heard someone clumping about on the other side of the shed wall, in the corner of the Dixons’ yard, by the sound of it, where they piled their garden clippings. Claire’s eyes widened.
‘Come on, baby,’ said a man’s slurred voice. ‘I won’t hurt you, I promise.’
Claire shook her head at me and raised a finger to her lips.
Another stumble and crash, closer this time. The man cursed. His breathing sounded like someone sawing through wood. At last, his muttering fell away. A short silence before I noticed, with a fright, the low hatch opening and Mr Dixon tumbled into our shed. I stepped backwards, almost tripping over the lawnmower.
He squinted up at me and, although he attempted to conceal his instinctive recoil, he was clearly thrown. There was a smear of dirt on his shiny cheek and sweat beaded on his high forehead. ‘Oh,’ he said with obvious irritation, ‘it’s you.’
Terrified (of what exactly I didn’t know), I nodded. From the tail of my eye, I noticed Claire had slunk deeper into the gloom until hidden behind a stack of sagging boxes full of old books. In an attempt to divert Mr Dixon’s gaze from alighting on his daughter, I gestured to the bench, where a wooden fruit box with pram wheels attached was resting. ‘I’m making a billycart.’
Still on all fours, Mr Dixon nodded. He looked not at the abandoned billycart, but around the dim shed instead. ‘At night?’
‘It’s cooler.’
‘Ah. So it is. You’re a bit like the chap from that fairytale, aren’t you? Beavering away in the night like Rumpelstiltskin?’
Emboldened, perhaps, by the inverted situation in which we found ourselves (he on all fours, I looming over him), I cleared my throat. ‘I’m not sure Rumpelstiltskin made billycarts, did he? I think he wove straw into gold.’
But Mr Dixon appeared not to register my little barb; one evidently needed something blunter to make an impression on a hide so thick and coarse. He sniffed the air, squinted at the cigarette butt on the floor. ‘You smoking in here?’
I shrugged, probably look
ed ashamed; I was, after all, always ashamed.
He considered me and smirked – congratulating himself, no doubt, for not saying It’ll stunt your growth. Although I was adept at revolving my body to spare people too frank a view of my hump, I sensed him trying to glimpse it, probably in spite of himself.
‘Anyway,’ he said at last. ‘I’m looking for our cat. Damn thing never does what it’s told. Needs a . . .’ He belched and shook his head.
‘Needs a what?’
‘A bloody good hiding.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen him.’
Mr Dixon grunted and peered around again before backing out through the low door. How delightful it was to see someone grub about in the dirt at my feet; at that moment I grasped what it was about me that so appealed (if that was the word) to certain people.
I hoisted myself up and watched through my grimy little window as he staggered past the pool, across the lawn and up the stairs into his kitchen. The slap of the screen door was loud in the night. I felt angry, rattled. Something had happened, but what? I fiddled with some tools on the bench and spun one of the billycart wheels. It needed oil.
After a few seconds, I sensed Claire standing beside me. I didn’t say her dad had been searching for their cat – not because she would have heard the conversation anyway, but because I knew Timmy had been run over and killed by a garbage truck a month ago.
‘You should come over for a swim one day,’ she said after an awkward silence.
‘School starts again tomorrow.’
‘Oh. Well, maybe come over after school?’
I spun the billycart wheel again.
‘The water is really lovely.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘Don’t be shy.’
‘That’s easy for you to say.’ This came out sharper than intended; I regretted it immediately.
Claire laid a hand upon my arm. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’ Her voice faltered, embarrassed, as people often were when they had to refer, however obliquely, to my permanent little companion. Then she rallied. ‘Kierkegaard was a hunchback, you know. He was a famous philosopher.’
I recognised the attempt to make me feel better and managed to smile. ‘Perhaps there is hope for me yet.’
‘Anyway,’ she went on gamely, ‘if you want to. I’m there almost every day. And I could do with the company.’
It took me two more days (peering from my little hidey-hole after school, trying on and discarding various clothing options like a grotesque little prima donna), but eventually I summoned my courage and squirmed through the hatch into the Dixons’ back garden after school one afternoon. Claire seemed pleased to see me – relieved, even – although I must have resembled a monster rising from the undergrowth. She fixed me a glass of ice-cold lemonade, plied me with cigarettes and offered me suntan oil for my pale skin. Miraculously, I managed to feel I belonged by her pool on a searing summer’s afternoon.
Of course, I couldn’t swim at all (how hellish had childhood swimming lessons been for me: those hours of distilled anguish!) but I was content to sit on the edge of the pool with my feet dangling in the cool water. I wore an extra-large t-shirt to avoid frightening the poor girl to death. We idled away the hours listening to music and chatting. She had finished high school the year before, but was already re-colouring the narrative of her life there with a nostalgic hue. It was the same school I attended, but her experience was so different from mine that she might have been regaling me with tales from the court of Louis XVI; while I was skulking in the library or hiding in empty classrooms, she had been smoking furtive cigarettes behind the bike shed with boys and dancing on the lawn to a cassette player hidden in her schoolbag. I knew there was an entire world taking place somewhere out of view but this was the first time it had orbited so close to my own desolate planet. I was fascinated, appalled, hungry for stories of its exotic inhabitants.
But as glamorous as her high-school years had been, Claire was restless, and longed to escape the city, her family, this country. The suburbs, she said, were only a way station before the future that awaited her in Paris or New York.
‘If I had the money,’ she told me one afternoon, ‘I’d definitely get out of here right now. Definitely. Even go up north and hang out on the coast for a while.’
‘That sounds nice.’
Enthused, she sat up on her banana lounge. ‘We should both get away from this place. My friend Bonnie hitched up to Byron Bay a few weeks ago with her boyfriend. It only takes a couple of days. You’d love it up there.’
Byron Bay. Even in 1983, the beachside town had the aura of Shangri-la: a tropical paradise of topless Swedish backpackers, of mangoes and dolphins.
‘I’ve got fifty dollars my grandmother gave me for Christmas,’ I said, ‘and I’ll probably get more for my birthday.’
‘Oh, you’re so sweet. But we’d need a bit more than that.’
‘How much?’
‘Dunno. A few hundred bucks, I guess. We could sleep on the beach. Imagine it, swimming all day long, fishing, campfires in the dunes. You can be so free of, I don’t know, all this . . .’
Momentarily overcome, I sat there picking at a splintered edge of the pool deck. No one had ever asked me to accompany them anywhere; even my older brother would sneak along the side of the house to avoid taking me to the park, despite my mother telling him to include me in his games.
I heard Claire get up from the plastic banana lounge behind me and walk across the deck. From her vantage point she would have had a clear view of my lopsided back, covered feebly by a sweat-damp t-shirt. I cowered and blushed. She stood next to me (red painted toenails, freckled calf) before launching into the pool and swimming underwater all the way to the far end and back. Her body flickered beneath the surface, a glassy waterfall across her face as she surfaced, the sound of her gasping for air. She shook her head, spattering me with water, with her laughter. I could have stayed by that pool for a thousand years, meek and mild, hoping for a few more such droplets of affection.
Then Claire looked over my shoulder with a strange expression on her face. Their kitchen screen door slapped shut and I swivelled around to see Mr Dixon standing on the back porch with one hand resting on the railing. White shirt, glint of wedding ring. Although his face was shaded, I sensed him staring at us. He didn’t move, didn’t say anything. I felt Claire’s wet hand on my thigh and turned to face her. She stretched up, like a mermaid, to kiss me full on the lips. Her squashy mouth, breasts pressed against my knee, humidity rising from her throat. The shock of it like a delicious, sodden punch in the mouth.
Then she hoisted herself from the pool and wrapped a towel around herself. ‘You’d better go.’
I could barely speak. ‘What?’
‘Time to go. That’s all.’
Still stunned, I lumbered to my feet, as elegant as a giraffe, and collected my things. I picked my way down to the hatch in the corner of the Dixons’ garden. Glancing back from the shadows, I saw Claire mount the porch steps and go inside without speaking to her father, who stood as if unaware of her, so intent was he on overseeing my departure. Eventually, he followed her inside. I watched the Dixon place through the shed window for several more hours but saw nothing further. My sullen confusion made way for something else. Self-pity, I suppose; grief; the usual.
Night fell. My mother called me in for dinner.
Claire wasn’t by the pool the following day when I got home from school, nor the day after. I loitered in the shed listening to the neighbourhood sounds: passing cars, lawnmowers, the corrugated tin roof warping in the heat. Late on the third afternoon I glimpsed her at the Dixons’ kitchen window. I held my breath as she stared out, her face like that of a spooky little doll. She waved uncertainly, although it was unlikely she could see me at the shed window from so far away. Then she turned aside, as if responding to a query from an unseen comp
anion, looked out again, vanished. I waited but there was nothing more. The meaning of this strange scene was elusive and in the middle of the night, having pondered it countless times, I wondered if I had seen it at all.
The next day the temperature was forecast to reach forty-three degrees Celsius, one of the hottest days ever recorded in Melbourne. Somehow I managed to convince my parents it was too hot to go to school and, after they had left for work, I scurried down to the shed. There was no sign of Claire, no sign of anyone at the Dixon place. By 10 am the air was limp with heat. Surely on a day such as this she would swim? Something was wrong. I decided to find out what. After much dithering, I crouched to go through the hatch, only to discover it had been nailed shut from the other side. Disbelieving, I tried it several times, but it was stuck fast. How dare he!
I was flooded with inarticulate fury and acted upon a sudden destructive impulse by smashing the stupid billycart to pieces with a hammer. By the time I had finished, sweat poured from my chin and my breath came in ragged clumps. An old mirror hung on the wall of the shed; I normally avoided them as assiduously as I avoided cameras, but on that morning I paused to inspect myself and wallow in the tepid bath of self-loathing. I smoothed my sweaty hair, practised my smile. Mr Dixon was right: I resembled a little goblin. Like that chap from the fairytale. I reeled away in disgust, but at that moment a plan formed in my mind.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 5