Take Three Girls

by Cath Crowley

  Friday 15 July

  Bec is absently flicking up and closing the lid of her Tic Tac container as we wander back to the bus after lunch. She just ate a huge public sandwich that she didn’t even want because of the PSST ana list crap.

  ‘Ady, tune in,’ Tash is saying. ‘Get that.’ She’s turning my shoulders, pointing me in the direction of a St Hilda’s-uniform-clad body tangling with a tall guy, not at all well hidden behind a bank of camellias. ‘What a slut.’

  Wow, the navy really stands out against the greeny. It’s the swim-girl boarder, Clem Banks. Interesting. Since when do lap-training drudges do illicit boy rendezvous? ‘I could not be less interested.’ I catch Tash’s fleeting smile of approval as I turn away. Being unimpressed is such a cheap win. Like being bored. But it’s a default mode with my group.

  On the bus back to school, Clem is sitting right in front of us.

  I reach forward and pull a dry twig from her hair. A barbed briar-rose stem. She twists around and glares at me. There are leaves and twigs all over the back of her blazer, as though the garden has tried to pull a school girl into its pagan embrace and hold her there. She escaped, but when she turns and frowns at me, I see her scratch-kissed puffy mouth and her eyes still full of that place.

  I’d love to dress someone as spring. Primavera. Rose red. Any old white shift, a gauzy fabric, a bit grubby and ripped, twined in creeper. Strewn with ivy leaves. And flowers. I would need . . . I look around. Kate Turner. Her dark hair, her pale skin, uncharacteristically pink-cheeked right now. Perfect. I would paint her face. Feathering fern fronds connecting her eyebrows to her hairline. Hair piled up and woven ratty with leaves and twigs and flower buds: a nest. She would be about to hatch, about to bloom. And the dress would be constructed so it looked like – like a garment in which to joyfully deflower. I declare this an active verb! Flower, deflower . . . An awakening motif. I’m twirling the twig, examining it, as I assemble the look in my mind’s eye, itching to make some sketches; but it’ll hold till later. Bare feet, tinted icy blue, walking away from winter . . .

  Tash says, ‘What is that?’

  I drop the twig. ‘Nits,’ I say. ‘Most likely.’ I pull another leaf from Clem’s hair and flick it at Tash.

  ‘Earwigs,’ says Tash.

  ‘Compost,’ I say.

  ‘Trash,’ says Tash.

  And there we have it. Another satisfactory reduction of someone who doesn’t count. We’re good at this. We don’t even have to try.

  Have I ever been so lost and entangled in Rupert’s arms as Clem was lost in her embrace just now? Pretty certainly not. Gotta say I’m finding the erect penis to be a distraction. It’s like an insistent puppy. If it could talk it would be saying something like: Sex, sex, sex, ready right now, I want the sex, please, do you want the sex, now’s a good sex time, sex, sex, sex, are we having sex now, let’s go . . . I’ll have sex when the time is right, so it’s not that I feel pressured, it’s just that I’m not as into Rupe as he and his peen are into me.

  In fact, I definitely seem to like Rupert more in theory than in practice. He never seems more attractive than when we are apart. That cannot be right.

  ‘Dreaming of your dream boy?’ Tash elbows me from my reverie.

  Do I reveal myself to my peers? ‘You know it.’ I smile. It’s the official smile of a girl who’s going out with a dream boy. But it’s not a smile like Clem Banks’s private, lit-up smile when she ran up to the bus late, claiming that she’d got lost.

  Saturday 16 July

  I wake tired. I sat in the bathroom for a long time last night, listening to music and thinking through my escape options. I’ve agreed to shop for formal dresses with Iris and Clem this morning but I’m not in the mood for shopping – I never am. I mainly find stuff online. I know my size. I know the jeans and t-shirts I like. It’s easier when they arrive at my door in a package. I hate shopping at the best of times, and I have a feeling that today won’t be one of those.

  I have to be there for Iris’s sake, though. The only reason Clem and Iris are going on the same shopping expedition is because they have to share their parents’ credit card, according to Iris. I’ll be the referee so they don’t tear each other’s throats out.

  ‘You need a date for the formal,’ Iris says while we wait for Clem to arrive. ‘I’ve got one. At least I think I’ve got one.’

  This is BIG news.

  ‘Who?’ I ask, and it tumbles out of her that it’s Theo Ledwidge. I don’t know him, but she says he’s gorgeous and she met him at chess club and it just happened. She says that last part as if it’s a miracle.

  ‘You need to hurry up and find someone so we can all go together.’

  Oliver immediately pops into me head. I picture him in a tux and bow tie with fantastically neat hair. We’re dancing and he’s telling me I’m not doing it right.

  Not Oliver, I tell myself, freaked out by my brain going rogue and suggesting him. I put it down to lack of sleep and the prospect of shopping. What I’m looking for in a date, I’ve just decided, is someone whose most obvious attribute is that he is not Oliver. That’s what I’m looking for in a guy: not-Oliverness.

  Clem knocks on our door – kicks at it, really – and saves me from further date discussion with Iris. When I open it she yells at Iris that she wants to be in charge of the card.

  ‘Mum and Dad put me in charge of the card,’ Iris says, and Clem tells her to hurry up, then kicks the door shut.

  We head to High Street, because Clem said that’s where the dresses are. Iris wanted the city, but she won the credit card battle, so I quietly suggested she give in on this one so we could avoid a raging fight at the tram stop.

  Clem sat with her friends on the tram, and now she’s flicking through dresses in the short-and-sexy aisle, while Iris browses in the not-so-short-and-sexy aisle. Clem snipes at Iris across the shop – ‘You’re in the old woman aisle’. Iris snipes back – ‘At least I’m not a slut’.

  A girl near us flinches.

  Clem and Iris are fraternal twins, not identical, but they’re recognisable as sisters. Clem is shorter and has the kind of shoulders shaped by the pool. Iris has the slightly hunched look that comes from sitting at a computer all weekend. Same brown hair, though Iris’s is longer. Same fierce mouth.

  It’s not really my kind of shop. Racks full of incredibly expensive clothes, all hanging under the cool gaze of a girl straight out of a fashion magazine. Her eyes are coated in dark green, and they make me think of a beautiful snake. She’s tolerating us. Buy or get the fuck out of my store, her green eyes say. And don’t touch the clothes any more than you have to.

  If I had a type of shop, I think it would be one that sells clothes like Max wears. Retro, original, stylishly haphazard. She looks like she’s thrown on a collection of things and they’ve assembled themselves into effortlessly cool. Since that never happens for me, I settle for non-descript and easy to match.

  Iris pushes me to try on a dress, though, and I give in. I grab one off the rack – deep blue, silk, short with flowing sleeves. Completely impractical for playing the cello. Too tight around the legs and I’d end up bowing the sleeves.

  There’s only one change room free – the big one – and we all go in together and move to our corners. Iris and Clem have their backs to each other, pressed into their corners, undressing without showing skin. I know Iris and Clem fight, but I assumed there’d be an intimacy.

  At Shallow Bay High, the Tripodi twins were in our class. They only seemed completely there when they were in a room together. I asked them once what it was like. ‘I’m completely my own person,’ June told me, ‘but somehow I’m Joanna, too.’ With Clem and Iris, it’s as though the thought they could be the same person sets them scrabbling against each other for freedom.

  When Clem and Iris are dressed, I’m the one who zips them both up. They turn around, and the first thing they see is the other, and then their eyes shift quickly to their own reflections.

  Clem’s dre
ss is red and short, her stocky swimmer’s legs on show. She looks amazing. Iris is in a black dress that ties around her neck 1960s-style and goes all the way to the floor. She looks like a gothic mermaid, and I wonder if I’ve misjudged her level of rebellion. I need to play her some Mazzy Star. Maybe The Cure. I can see her plinking around to ‘Fade Into You’ and ‘The Love Cats’.

  ‘Okay?’ she asks, and I say yes at the same time that Clem makes a snorting sound. I’d say it was bitchy, but Iris immediately fires back: ‘You look huge. Turn around and check out your arse.’

  Clem does, and I wonder if they were close once. If at some time Iris’s opinion mattered.

  There’s quiet for a bit, while they assess themselves, assess each other.

  ‘Will Theo like it, do you think?’ Iris asks.

  ‘How much did you pay him to take you?’ Clem asks. ‘Out of curiosity.’

  ‘At least I have a date,’ Iris says.

  There is an intimacy between them, I realise, but it’s a terrible kind where they know what to say to hurt each other and don’t hesitate to say it. You’d never talk that way to a friend.

  ‘I look like a mutant butterfly,’ I say as a distraction, waving at my outfit. ‘There’s something bizarre going on with the sleeves and the dress is way too short for my legs.’

  ‘You have great legs,’ Clem and Iris say in unison.

  We continue shopping.

  Iris goes into the change room to try on another dress, and I wander along the aisles, pretending to look at clothes but not really.

  Clem walks over and holds a dress up against me. ‘You’d look good in this.’

  ‘You didn’t look fat in the red dress.’

  ‘I did a bit, but I don’t care. Thanks, though.’

  It occurs to me that Clem is someone who might know how to get out at night. She’s the polar opposite of Iris. Street smart and only angry when it comes to her sister, really.

  She looks through the rack again, checking she hasn’t missed a bargain. I flick through next to her. ‘Have you ever gone out through the portal?’ I ask, and she says no, but it’s easy. ‘You just go down there, push and – voila! You’re free.’

  ‘But then what?’

  ‘But then what what? You’re free.’

  ‘But what happens if you get caught?’

  ‘You get suspended. So make sure it’s worth it.’

  Iris comes out in a shorter black dress, ending the conversation.

  ‘Morticia,’ Clem says, and then decides she can’t stand it anymore. She puts out her hand and demands the card. There’s some power play, but Clem wins.

  She runs out of the shop yelling she’ll be back in a minute. After Iris has changed, we leave and wait for her on the street.

  Clem jogs back eventually and gives Iris the card. ‘I took money out at the ATM.’

  ‘How much?’ Iris asks.

  ‘Not your business.’ She gives me what feels like an apologetic smile and says, ‘Good luck with the portal,’ then heads across the road to another shop.

  Iris doesn’t talk to me all that much after Clem goes. I can’t work out if she’s hurt by Clem’s comment or mad at me. It feels like both.

  Five shops later, she finally finds a dress. It’s black, but suits her even more than the others. Iris has red tones in her hair and the dress makes them obvious. She takes off her glasses and studies herself. ‘I’m wearing contacts on the night. And I’m getting SNS nails. You should book in with me.’

  It’s an offer of peace, and I take it.

  Iris and I seem to have a lot in common – maths, science, a deep love for Arrested Development, peanut butter and all things technical. But proximity made us friends. I don’t think we would have gravitated to each other naturally.

  I don’t mean she’s not a good person. On the first night, when I was homesick, she came over to my bed and sat next to me while I told her about the farm. I needed to explain to someone how I missed the animals, the river, all that space, but how, at the same time, I was desperate to come to the city. I needed someone to understand that I could want two completely different things at the same time.

  She listened, but she didn’t get it; in Iris’s mind, we’re one thing or the other. Still, she tried to make me feel better. She told me to open the calendar on my computer, and mark the holidays so I could see them coming up. I felt so grateful to her that I invited her to visit the farm on the long weekend in August.

  Maybe the reason why she and Clem fight so much is that Clem is all things happening at the same time. Iris thinks about everything she says, plans her entire day. Clem sock surfs down the corridor, collides with the wall and laughs hysterically. I think back to her in that dress today – the wild red next to Iris’s sedate black. I see Clem’s mouth, grinning, next to Iris’s cautious smile. It’s as though in the womb one person was divided. Iris and Clem – two halves of the same person – looking at each other and seeing themselves, seeing a flat chest or fat stomach, when they should see something beautiful.

  WEEK 2

  SHOW-AND-TELL

  Week 2: Identity, Part II

  Getting to know you . . .

  This week we revisit a fun activity from primary school: show-and-tell.

  Provocation

  A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

  Your closest friends were once unknown to you.

  Anon

  In order for us to get to know each other we need to employ respect and trust.

  We respect the confidences that are shared in Wellness classes. We trust our classmates with some information about ourselves.

  Helpful dispositions to bring to the activity: curiosity, openness, interest in others, suspension of judgement, suspension of preconceived ideas.

  Each of us has certain touchstone items that say something about who we are.

  Points for discussion/reflection

  • What is the intersection of objects and memory?

  • How might sharing a memory help others understand who we are?

  • How well do we really know each other?

  • Are there classmates we have labelled and dismissed?

  • How might we change our thinking about others?

  Task

  Share your thoughts and feelings about your item. Let us get to know you better through this sharing.

  Monday 18 July

  Bec and I walk to Wellness one step behind Tash and Lola. I’m looking forward to another slack class. I picture myself walking through the front door at home after school today and finding the guts to ask it out loud: Can someone tell me what’s actually happening around here and what happens next?

  Malik made us bring something that’s important or special for week two of this fruitless pop psychology exercise that is Wellness class. Fruitless pop psychology is Clare’s take on it; she’s harsh, but often right.

  Lola goes first. She cradles her dog Pepé’s ashes and starts to cry before she gets a single word out. (Dear little Pep! I’m welling up, too.) Bec jumps up and gives her a hug. Malik asks Bec to sit down, which is a bit anti-Wellness if you ask me. (Because Lola wants to be an actor, she does seize any opportunity to cry on cue, and Bec’s mainly hugging to enhance the class disruption, but Malik doesn’t know that.) Lola takes some deep breaths, and Malik gives her a nod of encouragement. ‘This urn holds the ashes of our darling little Pepé. We had to have her put down last year . . .’ She dissolves into another flood of tears. She does genuinely feel sad about Pep, but she is also honing her crying skills like mad.

  ‘Thank you, Lola. We’re honoured that you shared such a heartfelt memory with us today through this precious object.’

  Tash goes next, showing her first haircut curls, preserved by her mother, proving that she was once a natural blonde.

  ‘Things from our childhood are often particularly potent
emblems of who we are,’ Malik says. ‘Our sense of self springs from these years. Interesting aside: Victorian mourning jewellery uses woven hair as a decorative element in commemoration of someone who’s died.’ That elicits a few heartfelt ee-ews.

  I settle deeper into the beanbag’s hug and watch away-with-the-pixies Kate untangle a necklace that’s special to her for reasons I don’t tune in to. I finish dreaming up her Primavera costume as she sits in a pool of sun streaming through the stained-glass windows, flooded with new colours.

  My show-and-tell is so super special that my mother would have a thousand kittens if she knew I’d taken it out of the house. It’s a silver bonbon spoon with a vine pattern. It belonged to my great-grandmother, my gram’s mother.

  ‘Well, I’ve brought along a spoon today.’ It takes me quite a while to struggle out of the beanbag into a standing position. I walk to the front of the group and hold up the spoon, feeling suddenly stupid for bringing something like this to class, and then not wanting to pass it around.

  ‘Something about me is that I love eating, and we eat with spoons, so spoons are significant and important to me.’ A couple of people are amused. With a perfectly straight tone of voice, I’m sending up the activity without even trying. Malik’s serious, respectful look makes me want to scramble towards a conclusion, so I can sit down. ‘This was my great-grandmother’s. She lived in Vienna. And she loved pretty things. Like I do.’

  My great-grandmother lived a beautiful life in a beautiful house in Vienna, until being Jewish meant being persecuted. She and her family lost their beautiful life and lost each other. Only she survived, and all she ended up with was a handful of things that could be stitched into the hemline of a jacket. So I’m only sharing about two percent of the story. And if my mother really does face losing, say, her house, there’s probably trauma memory in her DNA that makes it more horrible than it might otherwise be.