Girls in Boys' Cars

by Felicity Castagna

  ‘What a woman needs is a car of her own.’ The sentence just slipped out of my mouth like that, in a voice that didn’t sound quite like mine.

  Asheeka looked at me like I was mad for a moment. Then a smile slowly broke over her face and she started banging her hands on the steering wheel and saying those words in a low and croaky voice again and again. ‘What a woman needs is a car of her own.’

  She squeezed my hand gently and said, ‘You crack me up, you know.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘What are we gonna do now?’

  Asheeka scratched the wheel with the tips of her nails. ‘Maybe we could repaint it in bright pink.’

  ‘Pink polka dots.’

  ‘Take it on the road, pink scarves wrapped around our heads.’

  Asheeka took her lip gloss out of her purse and put it on slowly in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘We could go west, way west. Let’s drive.’

  I didn’t actually mean ‘hand me the keys’, I was just getting into the story, but that’s what she did. She pressed them lightly into my hands and got out of the driver’s seat. ‘Don’t scratch it,’ she said. ‘Or Arnold will kill you.’ And I knew that she meant it.

  I took the keys and got in the driver’s side. ‘Arnold’s probably shitting himself right now.’

  ‘Yep,’ she said, ‘And you know he deserves it too. Let’s go up Church Street and back and then drop it off, you know, on the other side of the road from the McDonald’s parking lot.’

  ‘When we get back we’ll get out slowly, make sure they see us standing there and then we’ll just walk away, off down the street, like they don’t mean anything.’

  ‘Yeah and I’ll keep going and going and going and never turn around again,’ Asheeka said as she leaned back in her seat and rolled down the window. She stuck her hand in her purse and rifled through it before she found her lip gloss and reapplied it across her lips. I started the ignition and we were off. Maybe we weren’t movie stars but we were definitely starting to be somebodies. I gripped the steering wheel. I sent the car’s guts subliminal messages from my brain, telling it that I was the one in charge and it needed to do what I needed it to do. Then I drove at my usual 30 kms per hour, 40 tops. Asheeka refrained from paying me out like she usually did. Other cars beeped and swerved around me.

  I was just trying to concentrate on driving, sitting straight, keeping my hands in the ten and two o’clock positions, willing the car to drive in a straight line without hitting anything.

  But I guess that car didn’t want to hear all my subliminal pleading for a bit of cooperation.

  ONCE AGAIN WE LEARN THAT WE REALLY CANNOT DRIVE

  Looking back on it, the next thing that happened was the thing that really got us started running. It was never anything conscious. It was just like one thing happened and then another and then we had to keep going. I guess lots of books have this kind of storyline, you know, something beyond your control keeps moving you forward, yadda, yadda. In our case the thing that propelled us forward actually stopped us first – a pole.

  I thought maybe I could turn into Church Street and drive up and down it slowly a few times like the boys with the lowered cars did on Friday and Saturday nights. People expect that on Church Street. There’s not so much fist-waving as you float down the street being seen, not like on other streets where if you slow down too much the boys drive up your arse and rev their engines and threaten to run you down.

  I was trying to concentrate on the road but there were always other things trying to grab my attention. Like at that moment there was that woman. You know, the one person who is always there somewhere in your neighbourhood, the one everyone sees but ignores. She probably had a great story too, that woman, if anyone had bothered to ask her. Anyway, that night I saw her in the same thongs and long bright skirts she always wore, with a cigarette in her hand that had been smoked right down to the nub so that her fingers looked like they had caught on fire and were releasing smoke. I slowed down. Something about the craziness of the night made me want to pull over and ask this homeless woman if she wanted a lift. I’d watched her for so many years; I just wanted to do her the dignity, I guess, of cruising down the street in this big car with us so that maybe just this once people would smile when they saw her.

  But here’s what happened: I did that really hard thing of switching lanes three times so that I could get to her side of the road and then for no reason she stepped out onto the kerb and I saw her face front-on for just a second. Her face was infinitely lined like an old t-shirt you’ve shoved in the back of your drawer and all I could do was swerve left all of a sudden and go up onto the footpath and into that pole.

  I don’t know what happened to the woman after that. I was distracted by Asheeka screaming in a different way than she had a few minutes before. She jumped out of the passenger seat and ran around to the front of the car and started shouting through my windscreen. ‘It’s dented! There is a huge dent!’ Then she began to push the whole car from the front as if that would be the best way to get the half that was on the footpath back onto the road again. People started to stop there on the pavement. ‘Just wait, love,’ a woman with a pram said. ‘You’re going to hurt yourself doing that, and maybe someone else too if it rolls out into the traffic.’

  Asheeka took her shoes off, placed her bare foot against the bumper bar and tried pushing with the full force of one leg and two arms. I scrambled out of the car and ran to her, put my arm around her, but she slapped it away. I looked at the front of the car and thought it looked miraculous in a way. The bumper bar had been bent back and down a bit so that it looked as though the car was smiling. I poked Asheeka on the shoulder. ‘Look, a smile.’

  ‘We have to fix it,’ was all she said. She looked like she’d just rammed her face into a brick wall and was still trying to get over the shock of it.

  I climbed into the car and reversed it out slowly over the kerb. Asheeka just stood there on the pavement. ‘Get in.’ I wasn’t used to giving Asheeka orders but I guess at that moment she probably needed someone to. ‘What now?’ I said when she was sitting beside me. There were chunks of her bright red lip gloss missing where she had bitten her lip.

  ‘We’re so dead,’ she muttered.

  I didn’t know where to go but I knew that I needed to go forward. I drove straight. Slow. Ignored the beeps. Turned up the radio to tune them out. Tried to resist taking off into the sky.

  Above us the stars were too bright, like a thousand little spotlights looking down on us so that everyone would know where we were trying to hide. I thought we were dead too, but looking back on it now I think that was the moment when we both really started to come alive.

  THE MAGIC FARAWAY HIGHWAY

  All the roads led to highways and all the highways led to places we had been before. Asheeka stuck her arm out the window and let the wind hit it at full speed so that it bent itself back into a position that looked too awkward to be comfortable. ‘What do we do?’ I said, knowing she didn’t have any more answers than I did.

  ‘I don’t know. Just keep driving?’

  I wasn’t sure if it was a question or a request but that’s what I did. I drove. I tried to relax into it, to stop sitting there in the driver’s seat like I had a metal pole rammed down my spine. Asheeka was breathing in heavy, breathing out heavy. Breathwork. I recognised it from those strategies Ms Stacey gave us in home room – something that was meant to help us calm down before exams.

  The radio clock said it was 9.30 and my stomach said that it was way past dinnertime. We were driving down that part of the highway where all the different overpasses start to crisscross in the sky. When I was young and Mum used to drive us down this way towards my cousin’s house, I always called it the magic faraway highway. It made me think of those Enid Blyton books where the three siblings move to the country and discover the magic tree that takes them off into different lands whenever they climbed up the ladder at the top of its branches. All those bypasses looked like the a
rms of a tree. I wondered what new lands these highways could take us to now. The Land of Do-As-You-Please, The Land of Topsy-Turvy, The Land of Dreams.

  Asheeka’s phone kept ringing in her lap. From the driver’s seat I caught glimpses of the names flashing up on her screen. Ronny, Mum, Arnold, Mum, Ronny. I drove a little too close to the concrete wall next to the highway and Asheeka pulled her arm back in through the window and yanked her hair aggressively away from the edges of her face. I could see she was agitated but was trying not to be that way at the same time. I always found it strange the way she was so cool and calm about so many things, most things really, but stuff about Arnold stressed her out. She used her palm to tap out a song on the door. She was starting to let go of something inside herself. It wouldn’t have surprised me if our car suddenly arrived, right then, in a land entirely different from our own.

  Asheeka’s phone kept ringing. ‘How about we stop somewhere and eat?’ My stomach was screaming out empty gurgling sounds. ‘I can see the McDonald’s sign up the road.’

  I was still thinking we’d gone halfway to another world but here we were again under the same McDonald’s sky. It made me nervous. It made me think of boys. It made me think about all that time I felt invisible and then all those times all those boys looked at me too much and in the wrong way . . .

  ‘Down this way. Turn here.’ Asheeka started to give directions. There was something about Asheeka, the way she spoke to you like there was never any option to say no.

  ‘We used to go there,’ Asheeka said, making no attempt to explain who ‘we’ was though I knew that when her family first came to Australia they’d lived somewhere in these neighbourhoods on the south-western outskirts of Sydney.

  Asheeka walked up to the front counter at that McDonald’s in Campbelltown and I followed. She ordered for herself and for me too. I could see that the boy behind the counter was taking our order but also taking stock of us – two girls dressed up like we were going to a club, me standing there with no shoes on because one of my heels had broken somewhere back when I crashed and then jumped out of the car. On the other side of the restaurant there was a table of too many twentyish-year-old guys who also kept looking our way.

  Jimmy Barnes was cranking one out over the loudspeakers like he often did in the bowlos and RSLs of greater western Sydney. There were big guys with greying hair and leather jackets that said Hells Angels on the back. The walls were white with a strip of red tiles. We had driven backwards in time to some 80s movie. Things were scary and strange and electric and we had become all of those things.

  Asheeka was looking straight ahead at the wall as if she could make everyone staring at us go away simply by wishing it to be so. When our order was called, Asheeka took the tray and moved over to a table in the corner. I sat next to her and watched as she stuffed each chip into her mouth in silence one at a time, like a machine, and I could tell she needed all the quiet she could find to work out what two underage girls in too-tight dresses could do with a dented giant blue dream of a car.

  I was hesitant to start. I felt like if I took one bite of that burger I would need an ocean full of burgers to fill me up. Some guy at the table next to us looked at Asheeka and then at me. He took us in with his eyes, running them all along our bodies. He gave me a kind of half-smile that said, Yeah, and I’ll take you, I’ll take you both.

  I put my hands underneath the tray, lifted it up slightly from the table and angled myself away from the man. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself, for no reason really, but I also wanted to be polite, for no reason other than that politeness had been programmed into me.

  When she finally had words, Asheeka talked like she couldn’t see that everything around us was kind of terrifying and joyous and strange and overwhelming and that nothing she had to say really made any sense even if she was saying it like her words were wrapped up with all the logic of all the universe. ‘Let’s go to Minto. It’s not too far from here. I remember there was a guy, one of the guys who lived on our street when my family lived there, who had a garage on the corner. He could help us with the car I bet.’

  ‘What guy?’ I said. Asheeka always had a guy somewhere that could do her a favour. ‘You haven’t lived there since you started high school.’

  ‘Yeah, but I remember this guy. He’s probably still there. He can help us.’

  ‘It’s like almost ten at night.’

  ‘Yeah, well. We can wait for him.’

  ‘Where?’

  At this point Asheeka did that thing, like she was an irate lady speaking to someone who couldn’t speak English and was refusing to accept that not everyone does. ‘Just stop it,’ she said. ‘We’re going.’

  I never knew how to say exactly what I was feeling when Asheeka talked to me like I didn’t know anything. It was like this: I knew what I was feeling, or maybe I didn’t want to think about it but either way I found it really hard to make the words come out of my mouth. A lot of the time I did what people told me to do instead. It was better that way. There weren’t as many arguments. People didn’t notice you so much when you agreed with them.

  So, I guess what I’m trying to explain is that I’m no good in a lot of situations but I was particularly no good here. Asheeka was crazed and inflamed and I was feeling uncomfortable and I don’t think she really cared what I wanted but that was just how things were. I concentrated on stuffing as much burger into my mouth as I could so that there wasn’t room for any words to come out. I waited for Asheeka to begin.

  ‘We need to go. We can get a hotel room or something, or just, I don’t know, stay up. You know? My mum keeps calling and Arnold keeps calling. We need to get further away from them.’

  I swear, I should’ve known from all the books I’d read that one thing was going to lead to the next and to the next and that we’d just end up going and going but at the time I thought, all right. This night, this one time. I owed her that.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s go.’ Neither of us moved. I stared through the glass to the kids’ equipment, bare and lonely this time of night without all those small bodies climbing and screaming. Asheeka disappeared and returned with two sundaes.

  ‘Forget about it,’ she said, ‘for tonight. I’m meant to be on a diet too.’ And I wanted to explain to her again that it wasn’t about that, my eating so much before, my need to try and have some control over it now. It was a different kind of hunger that I now knew couldn’t be satisfied by food, but food had plugged some kind of hole for a while.

  One of the guys at the table nearby winked at me. I looked at him and then had to look away again. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not. In truth, I wasn’t sure if he was really looking at me. I guess I’d become a bit paranoid about it since Jake told everyone we were having sex.

  ‘So, like,’ I began to say. ‘Are we trying to get the car repaired or are we starting a new life or what?’

  Asheeka twisted the ice-cream around her spoon. ‘Let’s get the car repaired. That’ll fix everything.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You’re always overthinking things. Just slow down all that shit that’s going on in your head all the time. We’ll get this done and then we’ll work the rest out.’ She was fidgeting as she said this, stabbing her spoon into her ice-cream quickly over and over again, taking small bites, and I knew she had as much going on in her head as I did. Maybe I just needed an excuse to leave. Maybe she did. I’m not really sure, looking back on it all. I just think the world I was in was a confusing space but in retrospect so is everything else out there.

  ‘Do you remember,’ Asheeka said, ‘how we used to climb inside the play equipment at the North Parra Macca’s after school? How we’d climb up onto one of those plastic platforms at the top and we’d talk, like really talk, about all sorts of things?’

  ‘Let’s go there now,’ I said. We left our half-eaten sundaes and pulled back those big glass doors. They felt as heavy as they had when I was a child. Asheeka climbed right up to the to
p and I followed her to where the obscenely red and yellow plastic squares broke off into a tunnel. She climbed inside and I climbed in after her. On the inside the plastic was round and firm and predictable. The light and the chatter on the outside seemed far away.

  ‘I’m tired,’ I said.

  ‘Me too.’ She reached out for my hand. ‘You really need to learn to drive faster than a grandmother in a school zone.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. Maybe tomorrow.’

  She crossed her legs. Around her there was a halo of red plastic light.

  In the McDonald’s security footage they played in court, the video was on silent so that’s how I remember the next morning, even though I know the scene would have been filled with the sounds of cars speeding down the highway and Asheeka making small talk. We walked barefoot out of the children’s playground after spending the night there, and through the front door of McDonald’s in the morning. We were still holding hands as we walked across the parking lot and got into Arnold’s car again. We must have got back onto the highway not long after that. In my imagination we headed up on one of the overpasses and disappeared up into the air, into the Land of Do-As-You-Please where things were something like the real world below only everything was entirely different because we could be something bigger than we’d ever been on earth. In the Land of Do-As-You-Please, I could walk in high heels like they were ugg boots and drive cars like the hot chicks in The Fast and the Furious but I got stuck forever on that same highway, forever turning in circles, forever turning backwards, coming back.