Ben held his hand out towards me. He looked kind and inoffensive. ‘How about you dance with me then?’
Then I was up and I didn’t know why because I never had anything resembling coordination. I shuffled around like I had two plastic bags on my feet. It was harder than everyone made it look. Mostly I was just hopping around, keeping moving, instead of doing the steps right, but I had to admit it was kind of fun – all those people dancing in line with each other. You could lose yourself in all those feet. I got stuck in some kind of beat and just kept going and going with it.
That was until I accidentally put my sandalled foot under some guy’s boot and my toenail got ripped off. You wouldn’t believe how much blood can pour out of a ripped-off toenail. When I started to scream, they stopped the music so that everyone stared at me and someone rushed out from behind the bar with a medical kit. Ben and another guy took me to the staffroom, one of my arms around each of them. There was a stretcher in there, like this sort of thing happened all the time and they needed a space for people to recover. The guy from the bar bandaged up my toe and advised me to go to the medical centre in the morning. He let us stay in there for a while, me lying on the stretcher with my leg elevated on Ben’s lap.
Ben told me about the place he came from way out in the central west somewhere, where he lived on a stud farm that was bigger than my suburb.
‘But what do you actually do all day?’ I wanted to know.
‘Heaps. There’s always stuff that’s got to be done. Like, you’ve got to clean the horses and feed them and all the repairing of equipment and fences and the like. Takes an hour and a half each way just to go to the grocery store.’
I told him how I lived on the 48th floor and that sometimes even when it wasn’t windy down below all the pot plants would be picked up by the breeze and you’d come home to find a small tornado on your balcony.
Ben took a bottle of whisky from a crate on one of the shelves and we both took swigs of it. I drank too much at once and it burned my throat but it felt good to be so warm on the inside. Ben rubbed my leg but didn’t try anything more. He smelled like something comforting – bread baking in a warm oven – but I was grateful not to have to think about whether I wanted more or not.
When we finally went back out into the bar again the band was taking a break and I felt light and squishy in my brain from all the whisky. We sat down at that same booth again and when I caught my breath I started looking for Asheeka. Ben was tapping his foot against the floor, watching the scene.
‘Do you know where Asheeka is?’ I said.
‘Don’t know.’ He didn’t seem overly concerned and neither was I at that moment, sitting there, both of us with too much whisky in our bellies to realise what might have been happening.
ASHEEKA GOES MISSING
It was that night at the pub in Jindabyne that Asheeka went missing for the first time. When she hadn’t reappeared after a couple of hours I got Ben to call James on his mobile but he didn’t answer. We kept calling again and again.
‘Where do you think they are?’ I kept asking Ben but he looked at me and said he wasn’t sure. There was a kind of nervousness in the way he said it that told me maybe he was more certain than he was letting on. I knew he knew something I didn’t, but I couldn’t get it out of him. So I made him walk with me, down behind the pub and out towards the lake. He shrugged his shoulders like he knew it wouldn’t help and that started to drive me wild with irritation.
‘Call him again.’
‘Nah, he’s not answering.’ He took my hand gently, as though this was the time to get all romantic. That’s when I did the kind of thing I’d never thought I could do before. I pushed him, not that hard, but the sudden shock of it made him trip back as he reached out for my dress and brought me down with him. He rolled over on top of me and grabbed my wrist and held it down there on the dirt as he sat on my stomach. I could feel his belt buckle slicing into the flesh of my belly where my dress rode up. He looked down at my breasts and panted like he was some kind of animal and then looked up at my eyes and stopped.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and you could tell he was seeing himself.
He got off me, slowly, like he didn’t want to break me, and pulled me up. ‘I’m not like this, I promise.’
‘Where are James and Asheeka?’ I said. ‘Please. You need to call him.’
There was only dark down there. The stars. No moon. A glow coming from the pub but nothing else and it took me a while, spinning around in different directions and shouting Asheeka’s name, to realise that Ben was just standing there leaning against a tree. He had his mobile out and he was staring at the screen. I came closer to see what he was looking at but it was just a picture of James riding a bull on his Facebook wall. ‘James . . . he’s a bit of a dick,’ was all he could say, and then he put the mobile phone away again. ‘I think I know where they are. I think we should just go and find them.’
We walked. Said nothing. And then we arrived at the caravan park. On the veranda of one of the holiday cabins, James and Asheeka were sitting, smoking. They sat on two separate plastic chairs, too far apart from each other to say there was any love between them. Asheeka’s hair was all over the place, falling in front of her eyes, and I wondered why she didn’t fix it up. It was a few moments before she looked up and smiled weakly as though it took all of her energy to lift the corner of her lip. Barely a second later, Ben punched James in the head.
Asheeka stood, clambered down and took my hand, and we walked away in silence back towards where our car was down by the lake. By that time, it must have been four in the morning or so and all the birds were beginning to wake up and scream through the trees. Asheeka and I sat down near the lake next to each other and I put my head against her shoulder and we watched the clouds move and reveal the moon, all bright and silver and staring down at us.
‘What happened?’ I said, eventually.
‘It was a mistake, I guess. Or maybe not. I just wanted to try it to see what sex was like.’
‘But I thought you and Arnold . . .’
‘No. He wants to and he lets everyone think we have already and I suppose I was fine with that, or I didn’t know what to do about it, but I don’t know. My mum’s always going on about how your virginity is a gift you give to your husband and I didn’t want to give Arnold that gift. I wanted to, you know, do it on my own terms, or whatever. Maybe it’s silly. Maybe I shouldn’t have.’
‘Was it all right?’
‘I don’t know what it’s meant to be like. I don’t know. It was all right. I think. It hurt a bit.’
‘Was he kind?’
‘I guess. He tried to be romantic about it and stuff. We kissed for a long time before and I thought I wanted it and then the whole thing didn’t last very long. I don’t know. I thought it was meant to be more magical or something. It’s just kind of mechanical, isn’t it? And then it was over. When does it start to feel good?’
‘I don’t know . . . I liked the way, you know Jake said I had nice hair . . . nice legs. It made me feel good. It was better, most of the time, than the sex itself. It was after I had lost all of that weight and started to hang out with you, and started, you know, to look a bit better and feel a bit cooler. I wanted to try my new body out. It was like I turned into a lump when my parents broke up and we had to move out of the house with Nan and Pop and things felt really bad, and then I met you and I wasn’t completely lumpy and miserable, and things got better. I felt a bit less invisible and then suddenly there were boys saying, Nice hair. Nice legs. It made me feel sort of, I don’t know, powerful.’
Asheeka pushed her knees up underneath her chin and looked down the mountain.
‘I’d like to feel more powerful.’
‘I’m not sure it always makes you feel that way. Like Jake made me feel like I was the bestest version of myself, as if I was all lit up or something. But after we’d, you know, a few times, he just didn’t talk to me again and it was as though I had disappeared. As
if he had the power to switch me on and off like a lightbulb – there for everyone to see one minute, hidden in the dark the next.’
‘It’s not as mind-blowing as everyone says.’
I picked up a stone from the ground and threw it into the dark. ‘My mum told me once that sex is better in the imagination.’
‘I hope she lied.’
‘I hope so too.’
WOMEN DRIVING OVER CLIFFS
On the desk in Maree’s office there is a picture of her and a girl who looks about the same age as me. Maree’s got her arm around her and they’re both smiling these epic grins in front of a lake somewhere. ‘Your daughter?’ I ask.
She nods in reply and moves the conversation right on to me. It’s amazing, sometimes, how people feel they have a right to dive into your story but they don’t want to give up anything about themselves. I’d like to ask her about that lake but before the thought is even fully formed in my head she comes out with something about me having a problem being a follower, that I need to work harder to do what’s right, to not let others get me into trouble. I’m not 100 per cent listening. I’m still thinking about that lake, and besides, I’m pretty sure that’s what they say to every girl in here.
In today’s counselling session, I’ve got my copy of On the Road on my lap. I want to talk to her about it. I feel like it explains a lot of stuff about boys, but not girls, and that explains a lot about why we did the things we did. In her office, I’m sitting on the chair in front of her looking out through the window behind her frizzy hair. There’s the oval where the girls are meant to be getting exercise but everyone’s just sitting around, staring through the barbed-wire fence, like if they spend enough time looking at the free world they’ll somehow be in it again sooner.
She folds her hands in front of her, leans across her desk towards me and looks at the book in my lap. The tone of her voice changes to that kind of earnest adult talk that makes me want to slap people’s mouths. ‘So that’s what you wanted to do?’ she starts. ‘Go on a road trip like the characters in that book?’
‘No, that’s not it at all. We weren’t like the guys in On the Road. They just went on a road trip because they could, and you know from the start that they’re going to make heroes out of themselves without doing much. There aren’t any girls on a road trip in this. We didn’t go on the road just to see what’s out there, you know.’
‘Then why did you do it?’
‘Because we had to, because once we got going we couldn’t really stop.’
‘So you were more like Thelma and Louise, then?’
I stare down at the cover of On the Road. It’s got these two young guys just standing there against a wall, their hands in their pockets, staring out into space like they’re going out to own the world. ‘No. Not like that, I’d say. I never liked that film either.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, you know, the only deliberate decision they end up making is driving off that cliff.’
‘But you sort of drove yourself off a cliff in the end, too,’ she says, and I know she’s heading into that we all need to take responsibility for our actions lecture that everyone is so fond of giving around here. I know what she means by driving myself off a cliff but it’s not exactly true.
‘Did you know,’ I interrupt, and she lets me. ‘There is an alternative ending for that movie. They drive off the cliff and you see their car spiralling down, down, down, towards the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and then it cuts to an image where they land on the road and drive off into the sunset.’
‘So they live?’
‘Not really, I don’t think so. I think it’s a metaphor, like they’ll always be driving together forever and ever.’
She continues like she hasn’t heard me. ‘You’ve made some choices for yourself that weren’t the best ones.’
‘I don’t regret anything.’ But that’s not completely true.
‘Really?’ She folds her arms over herself and leans back and stares at me for a long time. In that space between the folding of her arms and when she asks the next question, I know she’s trying to get me to think about what I did in the end, right before I got arrested. I know she wants me to bring it up and to be regretful. To be sad. To be mindful of the damage I caused.
‘They tried to get you on attempted manslaughter. You could have wound up in an adult jail for a lot longer. You’re incredibly lucky. Do you think about that?’
‘Reckless Indifference. That was the charge.’
‘You’re right, Reckless Indifference. It’s a type of manslaughter charge anyway.’
She says it like the actual words don’t matter. Reckless. Indifference. ‘I didn’t care about those boys enough to want to kill them.’
‘But that’s what reckless indifference means. It’s when you don’t care enough about the sanctity of human life to care if you do kill someone.’
‘But that’s a metaphor too.’
She breathes deeply, slumps back in her chair. She is tired of what I have to say. ‘Right. Reckless Indifference is a metaphor. That giant McDonald’s M was a symbol for your life that you needed to get rid of. Maybe you just need to stop thinking in figurative language and look at the literal thing that you did.’
‘Maybe,’ I say but that maybe is so full of all the other maybes I’ve got going around in my head that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to explain it to her so that she gets it, like really gets it. Like, maybe we are all guilty of reckless indifference; reckless indifference is a semi-naked photograph of a girl on the internet, it’s the boy who refuses to look at you, it’s what I did to my mum, it’s everything and every person that got all these girls here in the first place.
SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS
We woke up, not too long after we’d fallen asleep, with sand in our hair and foggy heads. It was the morning of New Year’s Eve. We’d left all the car windows open when we’d crawled inside to sleep but it still felt like we’d been baked in an oven. Asheeka looked towards the mountains and said, ‘There. That’s where we should go. Further up there.’ So we put our crusty bodies into the car and drove towards Kosciuszko.
The roads leading into the mountains were empty and we drove slowly, letting the bitumen pull us along past all those eucalypts and dry grass and naked sheep, stripped of all their wool. After a while we pulled into a rest stop next to a trout farm. As I peed, I listened to someone in the toilet stall explain to someone washing their hands at the sink that most of the trout at the farm were dead. ‘It’s just too hot this summer,’ he said. ‘They’re cold-water fish. Can’t keep the water cold enough. Even in the farm.’
I left the toilet block and walked towards the pools behind a high barbed-wire fence, where there were meant to be fish growing but it didn’t look like there was anything moving in the water. Asheeka came up behind me and put her hand on the small of my back and said, ‘Come here.’
I followed her out behind the farm where the trees were starting to shake wildly as the hot wind whipped itself up between them and the leaves flew everywhere, and then I followed her as she walked out over a bunch of large smooth stones and into a river where the water was so clear it looked like glass.
Things were quiet and still and calm. We stood there, the water up to our knees.
‘I like it here,’ Asheeka said. ‘It’s not like home where everything always feels loud and frantic. It’s a different place.’ I watched her sit on a rock in the middle of the river. The water lapped against the hem of her dress.
‘Are you all right? You know, with everything that happened yesterday?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, and looked away, and I could tell she wasn’t so sure. She pushed her fingers against the hardness of her upper legs. ‘He said he liked my legs too.’
Asheeka was squinting up into the sun and saying something about the cold of the river and the super hotness of the sky. And then she was right up in my face. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. I wasn’t exactly sure what she was apologising for.
‘I’m sorry about saying you needed to lose weight and get streaks in your hair and stuff if you wanted people to like you. There’s plenty of other reasons to like someone.’
I looked at her face. ‘It’s all right. We’ve both done things that aren’t right.’
She stuck her hands into the stream and said, ‘And Jake. We never really talked about what he did and I shouldn’t have made you come out with him and me and Arnold when I knew he didn’t make you feel good.’
The skin on my legs feels tight underneath my fingertips. ‘I didn’t like how all those boys expected something from me after.’
‘They’re always expecting things. Boys. Girls don’t expect so much.’
Behind her I noticed a thick fog rolling down the river, but then I realised it wasn’t fog at all. ‘I think we need to get out of here,’ I told her. ‘That smells like smoke.’
SIX MINUTES
I wait in line. That is all you do in this place. You wait to be given permission to talk. You wait to be given permission to eat, to walk around, to shower, to sit down, to hear the decisions about your life being made by someone you don’t know. You wait for red ink and a stamp on a form that’s meant to tell you what kind of person you are. You wait and you wait and the waiting marks the minutes passing like the air that you breathe. In and out. In and out. And you try not to suffocate.
Breathe. Look at my toes. Stare at the wall. I am seventh in line, then third, and then it’s my turn. I pick up the phone and dial one of my four approved contact numbers. When it picks up the first voice is the machine’s: You are receiving a phone call from an inmate at a New South Wales correctional facility. If you do not wish to receive this phone call, please hang up now.
Then we begin. It’s not like the first time or two when things were awkward and we left lots of silent spaces between our sentences. You learn after a while to shove a twenty-minute conversation into six minutes because that’s all you’ve got.
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