by Kate Ryan
At the front door Ali hugged Ed quickly and then let go. She wanted to leave but also to stay, to retreat into the life they shared. Tam held her tight. Each day was new for her, ripe with promise. Yesterday’s events might never have happened. ‘A bear hug, Mum. Squeeze me. Tighter!’ Her breath smelled of milky cereal, and her backbones seemed hard but pliable, like a small animal’s.
‘I’ll see you in a couple of days, Tam-Tam. And I’m sorry I was so cross yesterday.’ Ali’s eyes were wet. ‘I was scared I’d really lost you.’
‘It’s okay, Mumma.’ Tam squeezed harder. ‘I’m sorry we hid.’ She drew back and kissed Ali’s cheeks, French style, ostentatiously, complete with sound effects. ‘I hope the funeral’s not too sad.’
As Ali’s taxi headed for the airport, she remembered that she hadn’t wished Tam luck for the concert. But it was distant now, trivial. It was the quests she thought of, their childish, malevolent power. She thought of these last few weeks. What would Jessie have said if she’d been the one to write about them, if they were her story to tell?
One day when Ali arrived at school, kids were gathered in tight little huddles in the playground. She rushed up to Jessie. ‘Did you hear? Someone set the pines alight at the high school in the middle of the night. Mum and Dad are freaking. Lucky the whole place didn’t go up.’
She looked at Jessie, who turned away, shuffling her feet on some leaves. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
Ali was excited. ‘The fire brigade came. Did you hear it? You would have been able to from your place.’
‘Nuh,’ Jessie said, apparently even more bored, swinging her way onto the monkey bars. ‘Didn’t hear anything. Pity it didn’t go up, though.’
Ali stood in front of her while Jessie looped her feet under the bars and swung upside down, her hair curtaining her face.
After school, she had left before Ali even grabbed her bag. As she walked slowly home it came to her.
Jessie had already known.
A day later she was in Jessie’s kitchen, trying to be invisible, waiting to escape, while Jessie shook salt on the popcorn they’d made. Matty looked towards Cal with a sly expression, competing for space with Jessie at the table, cutting tomatoes and throwing them on top of some burning garlic in a pan on the stove. ‘Told you the pines had to go, didn’t I?’
Cal eyed him intensely in fake lawyer mode, sitting with his feet on a kitchen chair with a copy of Cycle World. ‘Can the suspect tell me where he was on the night of December third?’ He slid his leg to the floor with a thump, put a tea towel on his head like a judge’s wig. Ali saw Matty smile. Sometimes they loved this kind of thing. ‘I put it to you that you, Matthew Morabito, had a very clear motive for committing the crime. In fact, you had, on several occasions, threatened to commit that very crime.’
‘Shut up, Cal! Where were you? Didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Ha! Mr Morabito, I put it you that you are avoiding the question. I put it to you that you, you, Mr Morabito, decided and acted, that you, Mr Morabito, burnt down the cypress pines at Bega High School.’
Ali and Jessie slid out of the room as Matty was coming at him, about to whip him around the legs with a tea towel. ‘You are so full of it!’ They were both laughing.
That night Ali lay on her bed and thought about what it meant.
She imagined Jessie ducking over the low fence at the front of the school. The pines dark, holding their own quiet, full of spiders’ webs; the dry smell of the pine needles making their way into her clothes, her socks, and the hushed brushing together of the branches. What would it be like for them to burn, to have made it happen? She imagined the sparks beginning, and the twigs and needles catching like the heads of tiny Christmas trees. She imagined Jessie lighting a match in the dark, blowing it out and lighting another. She saw her pulling a smoke out of Cal’s packet, taking a few puffs, standing up, walking closer to the trees, flicking the cigarette, half-finished, onto the ground underneath. Ali saw the glow spreading, the tiny red spark in the grey clumped needles, and then nothing. She imagined Jessie waiting. Sometimes, when she felt like it, when she needed to, she could wait. Ali could almost smell it — smoke, burning twigs, an orange glow beginning — and Jessie. Jessie being glad. And then she would have to have run.
Jessie wanted to go to the waterhole at night. It had been Ali’s idea originally, but only in the hazy way she sometimes saw things in her head. She hadn’t really wanted to go. The quests were beginning to seem tedious. She was thinking about high school. Who would she meet? Sometimes before sleep came, she touched her body, its new curves and strange swellings, its pulsing heart. What kind of teenager would she become? But Jessie pushed and pushed.
‘Maybe we can go to Merimbula pool instead,’ Ali said. ‘Dad can give us a lift. We could see a film.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Jessie said, ‘if you’re too scared, forget it.’ She turned away from her and put on Physical Graffiti, loud so she couldn’t hear her.
‘Jessie.’
She lay on her bed, eyes closed.
‘Jessie, don’t be a bloody pain. Come on, let’s do something today. I just don’t want to do that.’
Jessie turned over onto her stomach and put a pillow over her head.
After a minute or two, Ali left.
Next day Ali found her in the playground first thing. Watched her playing down ball with Benny, blurted out, ‘Okay, I’ll do it.’ Jessie got twenty shots in a row, and Benny clicked his tongue and said, ‘One more game, Jessie?’
‘Nuh.’
After chucking the ball in the air and catching it for a bit, Benny drifted off. Jessie turned around and grinned at Ali, her face flushed. ‘You won’t regret it.’
24
Past Cooma, the bare hills seemed like Ireland if you ignored the gum trees far up ahead. Ali had to stop and wait for cows to cross. A farmer sat smoking a cigarette in a tractor while the cows meandered into and over the road, their huge haunches swaying. She thought of the Jessie-cow, butting and pushing and mooing, of Aggie, wearing a purple-and-red floral dress, sitting at the kitchen table, her dark head bent over the poster she was making, her bare brown bicep as she stretched out to apply the paint. Ali looked ahead towards Bega, watched the speckled light on the trees, looked into the negative shapes between them, the sky, birds wheeling far up across the blue. The cows passed, the farmer nodded at her, and she began to drive.
It wasn’t midnight, more like 9.30. But dark enough. It was the last quest of the Experiential Club. Jessie had talked about a new club and a new set of challenges, but they both knew there wouldn’t be one. They were getting too old; old and even more different from each other, old and knowing and not wanting to say. Twelve, nearly thirteen. Sometimes Ali puzzled over this: what did it mean to stop being a child?
The moon was out when they reached the top of the steps. Jessie stopped, hesitated. How to negotiate them in the dark? Looking down through the trees, the pool was visible, viscous like molten metal. It appeared strange, otherworldly. Difficult to discern its texture — giving or repelling, hard or soft. They shone their torches on the steps, and Jessie went first. Ali followed after her, clumsy, the different heights of each drop once or twice jarring her knees.
At the bottom they shone their torches around the rocks and found a flat one to put their stuff on. Within seconds, Jessie was pulling off her clothes. With her blue bathers almost invisible, her limbs gleamed utterly white. Ali knew the smell of her — acidy, grassy — and her limbs, bruised and angled and always moving. She pulled at her bather straps. ‘Skinny-dip? I dare you!’
Ali glanced around. Her body was more rounded than Jessie’s. She had the beginnings of dark pubic hair, and small breasts that ached. She shook her head.
‘Why not?’
Jessie had already pulled down her bathers, letting them drop and then kicking her way out of them. She laughed and jiggled around lik
e a little kid. She was still so skinny, her long thighs like bones, ribs shadowed and separate.
‘Who’s gonna see? Mr and Mrs Koala?’
Ali giggled. ‘Okay.’ She turned away from Jessie and pulled down her bathers.
Jessie was already ahead. ‘Come on. Slide first.’
Ali scrambled after her towards the top of the falls. The rocks were still warm under her feet and she felt they might be alive. Where they fell away, she moved along crablike, cautiously. To the left was a hollow in the rock that led straight down to the deep pool below. They had swum there hundreds of times since they were little kids. Sometimes they’d come with the boys — Cal and Eli and Matty — and Aggie and one of her boyfriends, roped in to drive them all for the pure pleasure of seeing her in a black bikini. It was before she got involved in the protest group that was trying to stop things — woodchipping on the mountain, the plonking of a communication tower on one of the sacred places. Not that she had done much. A few petitions maybe, raving endlessly, stoned, with Claudio about Colonisation! Invasion! They had come with David too, sometimes. He would sit in the shade with a book, shirt half-draped over his head, oblivious to their whooping and splashing.
The slide was wide enough for a broad adult to lie down in it. You could tuck your shoulders in and drop feet-first into the pool. Jessie and Ali had seen many a big, hairy beer-gutted man going down with an almighty splash. Kids their age tried to keep as still as they could, like pins, and point their feet at the end for minimal splash.
‘Here goes,’ Jessie said. She levered herself into the rock space.
Ali’s eyes caught bits of light. The flick of Jessie’s long hair, her pale feet, then the water dividing neatly, like silk. Down.
And then whooa as Jessie surfaced, chattering, laughing. ‘It’s beautiful. Sooo warm.’ She dipped her head under again and rose up, shaking her hair from side to side like a dog. ‘Come on! You’ll love it.’ She splashed around for a minute, and then she was scrambling out to do it all over again.
As she did with everything Jessie did first, Ali tried to stop herself thinking. The air was on her bare shoulders. She concentrated on getting herself into position, easing herself in, pushing down her fear of scraping, injury, the strangeness of her naked body against the rock. She only had half a second to think that in the dark, with the rock holding her in, it was like lying in a coffin, and Jessie was shouting, ‘Come on!’
And then she was letting go, and entering the water was as easy as slipping into dream on a warm night. It seemed warmer than air, like bathing in something softer than liquid, like floating in sky. She pushed her arms to the side, and ripples washed away in a perfect circle. She looked up and she loved everything: Jessie, her bony pushiness and her moods, her way of making Ali do stuff, her crazy, laughing eyes and her twitchy legs; the trees, black and brown and reaching, twisting, like they were drawn in with a dark pencil, shaded in between and hiding unknown things; the rocks circling them, the blurred cloudy stars above her. She would be a writer. She had told no one, had nursed the idea like a tiny, fragile animal. But now she was sure she could do it. Maybe Jessie would do something too, something amazing — sail around the world solo or climb Everest. She could see her, red-nosed with cold and triumph at the top, not having the proper boots or jacket. Or maybe she’d live on an island like Robinson Crusoe and catch fish with her bare hands. She could see this too, her thin white-red hands rippling through the water and darting for them, one two three, now.
25
Ali drove faster than usual. The hire car was an automatic, smooth, brand new, carrying her up the hills, and it was easy to watch the speedo rise and rise. Now she was moving again she felt a jagged energy in her body, as if she could go faster and faster, let the wheel go, leave the road and let the car smash itself into a tree, and she wouldn’t care at all. She flicked around the radio stations but found nothing she wanted to listen to. Silence was better. The road stretched on. Her eyes were dry with exhaustion, but she wouldn’t stop till she got there.
She ducked her head under again, and when she surfaced Jessie was at the top. Ali swam to the side and climbed out. What could she do but follow?
They stayed in the pool, splashing and laughing, climbing up and sliding down a dozen times. Something had changed. The bush seemed to hold them; the different, separate darks of tree and shrub and the light sky. Ali wasn’t scared now. How good not to be. How good to forget to be.
After a while, exhausted, sated, they pulled themselves out to perch on the side of the pool, their feet dangling in the water. Ali felt the strangeness of being naked and not caring, only a towel to cover her. They kicked their legs and watched the ripples spread and settle. ‘We gotta jump,’ Jessie said.
‘What?’ It was always the same. She always had to push things further. Ali felt suddenly tired and lonely. Her mother had been gone for weeks, and now, in her chest, she missed her. She thought of her dad’s glasses on the coffee table, his head on the nod in front of the TV. She felt hungry. Toast. She wanted her dad to make her honey toast. ‘I’ll go home if you do.’ The prospect seemed impossible, all that way on her own, but she said it anyway. ‘That’s just stupid.’
‘It’s part of the experience.’ Ali hated the way she said it, as if Ali were slow, an imbecile. ‘To do what we do during the day except at night. It won’t count if we don’t. And we wrote it down. Anyway, it was your idea.’
‘Bullshit. That’s bloody bullshit. I never said anything about jumping. I meant the slide. You know I did.’
Jessie abruptly changed course, became encouraging. ‘It’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘Just a little jump. There’s stacks of room. We just have to jump away from the rock a bit. We’ve done it millions of times.’
‘But it’s dark,’ Ali said, hearing herself sounding like a scared toddler. ‘Waaaa, waaah! Jessie, I’m scared!’ Hysterical laughter bubbled up in them, petering out into quiet. ‘God, I can’t believe we’re here. Imagine if Mum knew.’
‘I know.’ Jessie’s teeth gleamed in the dark. ‘It’s stupendous.’ An echo came back, and Ali wrapped her towel more firmly around herself. It made her think of her mum again, all that folding and putting away. Perhaps she didn’t miss her after all.
‘Come on. Just once,’ Jessie said. ‘Then we’re done. It’s the last thing. The quests will be officially over.’ She got up and felt for her bag, fished around in it and Ali heard the shake of matches. ‘Look, I’ve got supplies to celebrate. Want one? Tailor made.’ Her lips smacked in relish at the term. ‘Pinched a whole pack from Cal.’
Ali said nothing but reached out to take one.
Jessie patted her backpack. ‘Got port for later too. And chocolate.’ She put a cigarette in her mouth and tried to light it, but the flame sputtered and went out. She licked her fingers and closed them over the head of the dead match, tucked it in the box and took out another. ‘Better be careful.’ She grinned. ‘We’ll be in real trouble if we start a fire.’ She lit the next match and the flame briefly illuminated her, her face triangular, her shoulders sharp. ‘Here,’ she reached out for Ali’s cigarette and lit it from hers, passed it back.
Ali sucked in the smoke. It was bitter and strong, a dizzy rush at her temples. She closed her eyes for a second. ‘All right,’ she said, opening her eyes again. ‘But I’m only doing it once.’
Jessie nodded, wise, as if she had known all along that Ali would agree. She could be gracious now she had got what she wanted.
They sat, sucking in smoke and blowing it out. Ali looked up at the sky and thought of the Big Bang theory, of planets being created, the documentary she had seen about the figures on Easter Island — monumental, broken, silent — as if they had formed themselves to guard the land from the sea.
They stubbed their cigarettes on a rock, and Jessie picked them up, tucked them away in the matchbox. It touched Ali suddenly, this uncharacteristic neatness. She li
ked her again; maybe she loved her.
Then Jessie shook off her towel and Ali did the same, tossing it back onto the rocks. They dropped into the water again and swam across. Jessie pulled herself out and darted ahead — even in the dark she darted. Ali followed carefully, feeling the way with her hands and feet.
There were two places to jump, one lower, one higher, both perfectly safe in daylight. Seven-year-olds did the jumps. The pool was very deep and wide enough. You just had to jump away from the rocks about half a foot.
Standing behind Jessie, Ali could see the shape of the pool clearly, the rocks a darker ring. She could feel her toes gripping on. She shivered. Hunger again — or was it sickness? — sharp and queasy at the same time. She had a sudden fear that she was getting her first period, that blood would drip out onto the rock.
Then within seconds Jessie was leaping out, into darkness, space. No time for thinking, for being scared, just a deep splash that could be the end or nothing, and up she came again calling, ‘Whoa! Come on! It’s easy peasy.’
Ali tried not to think, but it was impossible. Her mind was racy and jagged. She wanted her dad, her mum, her warm bed. She thought of Cal, Eli, Aggie, high school. What if she never got there? The water was brighter in the dark, a subdued radiance, the rocks clearly delineated. Jessie had pulled herself out of the water and begun to chant, ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. GO!’
There were moments, Ali knew, when you were so afraid you would die that there was nothing more, nothing you could do. You might as well abandon yourself to it, sink, become part of it. And that was what she did.
She let go.
26
It was too early on the morning of the funeral. She pushed open the glass doors. The place was all the same but smaller, cleaner — the little kiosk, the cracked concrete. A sleepy, dreadlocked surfie-looking girl, incongruously dressed in a navy sports-centre polo top, was half-heartedly taking admission. A shade cloth was stretched over the baby pool. The water in the lap pool glittered cold and flat. There was no one there early on such a cool day. As she swam, she was aware of the roof of the showground pavilion next door, the ghosts of her and Jessie, high up, surveying their world. In the space of the water, she could almost be there.