I have over one hundred notifications. I ignore them and take three deep breaths. I haven’t been on since last week, so to get to the night of the party I have to wade through everybody’s perfect lives.
Lukas has posted something a few minutes ago about mateship. Some soldier mantra. Real men look after their mates, he’s written underneath. Tagged Jack and Kyle in it. Also Joey.
Kyle’s put up a picture of himself with his arm round Lukas’s neck. Solidarity.
Angel has tagged Chante in a picture and made her look angelic with some app that has given her sparkles and a halo. The best part of me, she’s written. Chante has typed a string of hearts and kisses in return.
Apparently everyone has someone they can count on.
Alex’s post from Sunday slides beneath my fingertip. There she is, with her perfect family, in their RV by the beach. Glamping, it says. She spent Saturday night snug inside with her parents. Having innocent, organic fun.
Then, with a jolt, I hit the party pictures. From after I left from the look of how messy and drunk everyone is.
Jack playing guitar. Rock on peeps!
My heart thuds a little harder.
The twins, heavy eyeliner and tongues extended towards the camera, matching tongue rings on display. Yeeeew!
Lukas. A collage of pictures of the boys drinking. Joey downing a shot.
Kyle. A selfie with me singing in the background.
kyle.the.man sing it up princess!
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My heart is in my throat and my ears. Pounding like an alarm.
There I am. Hair on fire, face frozen on screen.
I tap view all comments and a sickening feeling crawls up my throat as I read.
Bahahaha . . . Ruby the rock chick!
Throw something at her, wouldya?
I think a cat just died.
Just coz you CAN sing, doesn’t mean you should.
Who’s the ranga? Never seen her in my life.
Cool song!
Wait . . . is this that chick . . . (laughing emoji) Share her round boys!
Wow. That’s one helluva voice.
I can’t take it any more, can’t feel much of anything aside from my prickly, swollen throat. Like a thousand bee stings. That’s when I come across Kyle’s next trick.
kyle.the.man The ultimate cringefest.
It’s a clip. A clip of me.
Reflexively, I touch on the link and it opens in YouTube. Already over nine hundred views.
I press play.
‘Oh, so many nights I have dreamed of you . . .’
My voice is tinny through my phone. No longer rich and clear. Maybe I only imagined I sounded good. And am I swaying? I want to drag that Ruby back down to the crowd, tell her this is a bad idea, make her stop. But she’s smiling. She’s completely unaware.
I work the guitar like it’s my own. Actually, my guitar work is decent. But I look back at my face, eyes closed now, still swaying. Oh god, I am witnessing a social suicide. My own. I need to stop watching, but I can’t.
My eyes are open again now, and I’m smiling at someone in the crowd, singing just for him. Oh, Ruby, save yourself.
I know what happens next, but still I plead with myself to stop. Go home.
I wish I could touch the green wool of my cardigan again. I threw it into the trash the next day. A small thing to lose in the scheme of things, but I cried hot tears over it anyway and now I want it back. Unstained.
It was one of a kind, Nan said. Off the shoulder, just the right shade to complement my hair, she said.
Now it’s in a pit of refuse at the tip. I can never get it back.
Someone moves the camera over to Joey. He turns to the camera, grinning. The person holding the phone punches him on the shoulder. It’s almost congratulatory. Then Joey is watching me, head to one side. The camera pans back to me, so absorbed in my pathetic song.
I don’t look scared. I would be if I knew what was going to happen next. But life never warns you when the punch is coming. It saves up all the horrors in its clenched fist. Maybe none of us are strong enough to handle the grief in advance.
Pain at every turn.
So if you love me the way that I do you,
Then maybe, just maybe you’ll know what to do.
Oh, he knew what to do. He knew exactly what to do. Tears sting the corners of my eyes. My stupid, innocent self. The very last minutes of her, and she didn’t even know it.
And we can put down our faces with our dirty masks
And build little castles as we dream our tasks
Of a life so perfect and a love so true
Where we can fly together in a day so blue.
And then the song is over. The torture of the recording, finished. But my mind plays out the rest anyway.
A thought creeps in: This is when he raped you.
That word. Rape. It’s not one I associate with Joey. I kissed him that night, held his hand, went with him to the back of that yard. There were people around and I said I didn’t know, but I didn’t say stop, don’t do it. I didn’t say get the fuck off me, even though I wanted to, wanted to scream. I didn’t say no with words, but I sure as hell didn’t say yes. And he sure as hell never asked.
Yes, I was drunk. I chose the wrong people to trust. The wrong place to be. And I was stupid. It wouldn’t have happened if I was sober.
But now my body no longer feels like mine.
Was I raped? I don’t know.
There’s only one weapon I have left to protect myself. Delete the app.
I open Insta again and am assaulted once more with an image of myself. A new one. Me, wandering Anna’s backyard alone, looking lost. Dazed. Vulnerable. I know exactly when this was. This was after. After Joey. Only I had no idea Lukas was watching me. Or taking my picture. Or that he was going to post it online without asking.
I hold my finger down on Insta and feel a strange empowerment watching it disappear. That’s one way they can no longer reach me.
I force myself to my feet. Fill my lungs as deep as I can. Hold it, exhale. And again. It’s the same technique divers use to expand their lungs.
Before Alex and I fell apart, we’d come to the hangar together, sneak into its vast, creepy darkness and shout funny things into its emptiness. Things like ‘banana brains’ and ‘dingle dangle’, just to hear the echo.
‘This would be the coolest place for a concert,’ I’d said.
We’d locked eyes.
‘So try it out,’ Alex said.
I wouldn’t have had the guts in front of anyone else, but we’d always shared our art. So that first time, I climbed the creaking metal staircase to the second floor.
I felt so high up there, Alex so small down on the concrete. I must have looked petrified. Probably I blushed, giving me the triple-red factor: name, hair and face. Kids used to delight in teasing me about it in primary school. Alex must have noticed, because she called up, ‘It’s only me. I’ve known you since you picked your nose.’
‘I didn’t pick my –’
‘Gotcha!’ Then she’d grinned and my nerves dissolved.
I chose ‘Forest Bird’. A song I’d written about our adventures when we were kids – Alex, her cousin Erik and me in the forest. Not just her cousin – my friend. It’s a song that embodies the kind of courage I could only dream of now.
I wondered if this was how singers felt up on stage. Was this how Mum felt in her concert days? When people paid to listen to her, and she was fearless.
‘Little bird with the broken wing,
Feed from me and I’ll teach you to sing . . .’
In that quiet space, my voice echoed like a thousand cries.
‘Woah.’ Alex held her hand to her heart.
The acoustics were crazy. My voice, amplified, singing back at me from the walls. Chills ran up my arms, and I grew a little taller.
‘Now, hush, little bird; don’t say a word,
Cause
the forest boy, he’s got healing hands,
And he’s gonna fix all your flying plans.
So hush, little bird; don’t you say a word.’
It was one of my favourites, only I’d never sung it without the safety of our home’s small walls and Mum’s piano drowning my voice into the background.
That’s how much I trusted Alex.
I close my eyes and imagine myself again on a vast stage, in an amphitheatre. Lights so bright, I can’t see anybody in the crowd. Just a black ocean.
Then I start. Softly at first, my voice a hummingbird in the cool air.
It still works. It’s hiding inside me, unbroken. Even if nothing else is. As if to show me just how unbroken it is, my words echo back at me, deliciously shocking in clarity.
I can claim no credit for my voice. It’s a gift from the universe. Unearned. But it is mine. I own it. Nobody can steal it away. Singing is the key that unlocks all my chains, turns me from rags to Cinderella.
I open my throat against the ache welling up inside it and unleash. New words. A new song.
‘The first time we kissed, I made a vow.
You would be mine, here and now.’
I love how my voice trembles, the tone it makes in the hangar.
‘But you were nothing more than a mirage,
So very quick to sabotage.
While I dreamed of touching you,
Making love broke me in two –’
Wait.
It wasn’t making love. There was no love in it. No care. No tenderness. No intimacy.
Fuck it, this isn’t a love song. This is an angry girl song.
I up the tempo.
‘All I wanted was you, you, you.
Wanted every piece.
But being used by you, you, you,
There wasn’t any me, me, me.
No room to say, how you doing,
You look beautiful, you okay?
It was all just do, do, do.
Million miles of do, do, do.
That only took a few, few, few
seconds, can’t undo, undo.
Want me back the way I was, was, was
Before you took your piece of me,
Before you took –’
An oblong of light silences me. A breach of air. The squeal of metal, a shadow falling long across the hangar. Someone has entered my space. Broken my song.
I crouch below the balustrade, my last breath trapped in my lungs. I never imagined the hangar as a trap before, but that’s suddenly what it feels like.
Shoes squeak against painted concrete.
I’m frozen. A game of musical statues where if I can just stay still whoever opened the door will shut it again and go away.
My heart’s like a drum in my chest as the feet advance into the hangar. I shrink back from the balustrade. A figure rounds the corner and stops below me. I catch a glimpse of black hair. Hold my breath. My heart only pounds louder.
The shirt is the kind I’d know anywhere because Grandad wore the same one. With gold wings clipped to his left breast pocket and navy stripes on his lapels.
I loathe uniforms. Mum says they give people power, like that cop who pulled me over. Pilot uniforms are all pressed and crisp and worn to declare importance. Even from here, I can see he’s going for that close-shaven, clean-cut thing pilots have in movies. Young pilots. Fighter pilots. That blend of square-jawed bravery and boyish charm you don’t see in real life.
Did he hear me singing? It occurs to me that I have a whole lot more to worry about than my voice. Like the fact that I don’t have an ASIC card and I’m on this side of the cyclone fence. He could call the cops. I’m on the CCTV footage. Me in a hoodie, cap pulled down, looking dodgy as hell. There’s a $5000 fine for trespass, which Mum and I could never pay in two lifetimes smacked together. What happens if you can’t pay a fine? Do you go to prison? Prickly sweat wraps itself around me. Singing has never seemed a less innocent pastime.
I press my hands against the carpeted floor to stop them trembling. Beads of sweat trickle from my armpits down my rib cage.
If he finds me up here, I’ll say I’m a friend of Alex’s. It’s not a total lie. I was a friend of Alex’s. I’ll say Grandad lets me come here. Another sort-of lie. He’s not my grandad, and he doesn’t know I come here anymore.
The guy’s moved somewhere out of my line of vision. Maybe he’ll leave.
There’s a dull groan of metal. One I know too well. The noise the bottom step of the staircase makes.
I grab my hoodie and scurry, rat that I am, into a storage room, and slide behind the door.
My breathing is ragged. I focus on slowing it down.
I can see down to the floor of the hangar through the crack in the doorjam. Can see the Bluebird, perched silently. But I’m at the wrong angle to see him. I can only hear the light pad of his shoes, which have now reached the top of the landing.
Please not the storage room, not the storage room.
I realise I’m holding my breath. I let it out, at the same time as I hear a noise. A small squeal of metal, like wheels on carpet. A chair maybe. A low beep. I know that beep. Grandad’s computer. He’s in the office next door. He hasn’t heard me. He’s just after paperwork or something.
After a while, I hear the sound of the old printer. There’s a mumble, maybe a curse. The printer always used to give Grandad hell.
I don’t know how much time passes, but my calf cramps up. I gasp, but don’t dare to bend to massage it out. I breathe through it until I hear footsteps down the stairs, growing fainter.
There’s a loud groaning noise, light flooding the hangar, a roller door opening onto the taxiway.
Then the guy is in my line of vision. Younger than I thought. Maybe just out of school. Standing before the Bluebird. He reaches out one hand, strokes the top of the plane above the cockpit. As if it’s a wild animal he’s coaxing.
He walks around the Bluebird, touching things, looking at the wings, moving the rudder piece on her tail, unscrewing something from the wing and pulling a long stick out, examining it. Then he takes away the yellow chock pieces wedged in front of her tyres.
When he’s done, he stands still in front of the Bluebird for a moment, admiring her. Or maybe hesitating, I can’t be sure. But he stands there a long time.
Finally, he opens the cockpit door. Sticks his head in, looks around. I draw a breath. Nobody goes inside the Bluebird without Grandad. He’s only ever let a handful of people near her. I was one of them. Even though I was too scared to fly.
The pilot puts one foot on the wing, about to climb into the cockpit, but he doesn’t. He pauses midway, like he can’t decide if he should be doing this. Is this a theft? Is he battling his conscience?
If he is, his conscience just lost, because the pilot is inside the Bluebird now, pulling on a headset. Something I’ve only ever seen Grandad do before, and that was over a year ago. I step out from behind the door, unsure what to do.
I’m standing at the balustrade before I remember the criminal act I’m committing just by being here.
What can I do, anyway? I weigh probably half what this guy does, and it’s only the two of us. I think about what Joey did to me.
Small details resurface. Tree roots against my spine. The scrape of Joey’s shoe against my leg as he pulled down my undies. The pain.
So I don’t yell out. Don’t run down the stairs and demand to know what the hell this guy’s doing with Grandad’s plane. Like the coward I am, I let him turn the ignition, so intent on his task, on watching the dials and gauges in the cockpit, that he doesn’t even see me standing on the balcony above.
He starts the propeller, which sputters a few times, before whirring to life. Thundering life.
I feel sick as the Bluebird rumbles forward, rolling out of the hangar, and onto the taxiway. I watch her grow smaller and smaller, until she roars down the runway, nose pointed in the air. Then she soars into the blue day, wings wobbling till they clear the air pockets, sun
glinting off her frame as she’s freed from her cage for the first time in over a year.
Maybe I could have stopped him. But I let him take her. The Bluebird. I’ve lost her.
I watch the Bluebird until she’s just a speck, until she melds into the sky and disappears. And I ache with envy. I want nothing more than to fly away too.
My eyes sting. I run down the stairs. It’s not till I scrape the hangar door shut behind me and the afternoon sun is biting my eyes that I realise something else I’ve lost: my private space.
My secret place, ruined by a guy in a uniform.
Driving along the dusty road to our house with the aircon blowing, I watch out the window as the open plains change to thick forest and the trees grow denser, the air darker. Then I pass the boundary fence to our neighbour’s property and the first dog appears, strung up by its hind legs, belly swollen, mottled scraggy fur standing on end, mouth set in a grimace.
I guess people who aren’t from around here would be shocked by the dogs strung up on fences and telegraph poles. And it’s only in the last few years the land owners have started doing it. Since the drought set in and the creek beds in the forest ran dry, and the dogs have come back closer to the homesteads and the farms. The farmers knock them off, one by one, and hang them high. Passing the bush memo to each other. One less to deal with.
Dread rises inside me like a king tide. School has been a nightmare of hiding in the library and talking to no one. Pretending not to hear the comments people make. At home, there will be dishes to wash. Homework to do. More questions to field.
Around the next bend, the house peers out from behind the trees. There’s a car parked in our drive. An orange, low-down sports car, speckled with dust. I hit the brakes.
This car doesn’t belong at our house – doesn’t belong here at all. We’re a town of four-wheel drives, trucks and bush bashers. We string feral dogs up along fences. We do not drive Lamborghinis.
I grab my bag and walk hesitantly to our front door.
There’s a noise from the house. A bubbly, soft, floaty noise. Something that sounds a bit like . . . Mum laughing?
The front door’s unlocked, so I push it open and look from our front door through to the back sliding door. Mum is sitting on the deck, hair falling in perfect ringlets down the back of her wheelchair. She’s lit by the firey afternoon sun, hands swooping dramatically through the air as she talks.
Ruby Tuesday Page 6