He patted me on the shoulder and let his hand drop. ‘Look me in the face, love. Ask me nicely.’ A real soft, nasty voice.
‘Lay off, Ed,’ one of the mates said warningly—that was Pug.
‘Just want her to be polite to a guy, mate.’
I hissed through my teeth at him. ‘Get out of my way, shithead.’ Any second I was going to attack him!
He dropped his jaw. ‘Now, that’s not very nice, is it?’
‘E-ed.’ His mate was a step closer, the other two hanging back and watching.
I felt myself going off my brain. ‘Did I ask for your stupid whistling, your “compliments”? I was just walking down the street, for God’s sake. You guys all think you’re God’s bloody gift, don’t you? Think every girl’s just hanging out for compliments! Well, we’re not! We couldn’t give a stuff what jerks like you think!’
‘It’s okay,’ said the other guy at my shoulder. ‘Ed, fuck off now, hey?’ But I was just as angry at him! I didn’t want his stupid protection!
‘What’s she getting so upset about? She’s not so great-looking anyway. No tits, no nothing.’ Ed started sidling off.
I yelled at him, ‘Who cares, you moron? Better than having no brain!’ My knees were shaking with rage, and I had to charge past him up the street so he wouldn’t see.
‘Geez, you’re a dickhead, Ed!’ I heard the mate say.
After a pause to think, Ed yelled back, ‘Geez, you’re a wimp, Dino!’
‘Hey—’ Pug was catching me up.
‘And you can bugger off, too!’ I said to him. I just wanted to get away before the tears started, didn’t want any of them to see me crying.
‘It’s okay. I don’t want to hassle you. I just don’t want you to let that fuckwit get to you.’
I couldn’t see him through tears vrooming up to my eyes. ’You’re the fuckwit, hanging out with such a jerk …’ My voice gave out and I had to face the fact that I was crying.
‘Really he’s okay. He just goes stupid when there’s girls around.’
When there are girls around, idiot.
I had to wait at the corner of Lennox Street for cars to pass, and the shaking came up from my knees and took over; I gasped and sniffed and wanted to be somewhere all on my own where I could howl as loudly as I wanted. Instead I licked up the tears and slimed the back of my wrist with my nose. ‘Oh, go away,’ I told him as he started crossing the road with me. ‘For God’s sake!’
‘Hey, sit down for a minute, eh.’ He pointed to a park bench. I nearly tripped over the edge of the path, and he touched my elbow to steady me. ‘Come on, you can’t hardly see where you’re goin’.’
He sat down at the other end of the bench, which I guess was better than standing over me, but I still wished he wasn’t there. I was ashamed of cracking up—I just wanted to get away.
I was mopping at my face with a been-through-the-wash tissue I’d found in my pocket when he spoke again.
‘You don’t want to take any notice of Ed. He’s a immature bastard. Doesn’t know when to stop.’
‘Pretty hard not to take notice, when he’s parked right there in your way,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah. Sorry. He just goes stupid, like I said.’
He was trying really hard to make things better. I remember thinking what a serious person he seemed, in spite of the fact that he could hardly string a sentence together.
I can still call him up from then. He had a neat haircut—neat as in short and neat as in cool, and he wasn’t wearing a back-to-front baseball cap like the other three dudes. His black hair gleamed in the sunshine. His face—well, the memory of his face is all mixed up now with seeing his face in other sorts of places and lights and ways, but the eyes stuck with me, so pale, and the lashes and eyebrows so dark. He looked so clean, somehow, and cool, in spite of the steamy weather—I was damp all over, not just around the eyes. I noticed how fit he was, too, not puffed-up muscle like a gym junkie or anything, but I remember staring at his shoulders and arms, following the curves of them.
‘It’s just that I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all,’ I said. ‘And, you know, some days you wake up feeling strong, and some days you just can’t cope with things like that.’
He nodded without looking at me. I saw a little smile on the side of his face. ‘I dunno. You coped okay, I reckon.’
‘Huh. He still didn’t move out of my way, did he?’
‘I thought you were gunna take a swipe at ‘im!’ he laughed.
‘I was! I should’ve! Mind you, he could’ve hit me back harder.’
‘Nah, he’d’ve been too shocked. Anyway, he wouldn’t hit a girl. Even Ed’s not that much of an arsehole.’
I didn’t know what to think of that. It was sexist, but a different kind of sexism from the kind I was used to at school. It was kind of old-fashioned, gentlemanly, kind of a bearable sexism. Again, he was perfectly serious about it.
Then he looked at me and we both smiled, and there was a connection there, and as the smiles tailed off I thought, That’s not all. Something else has to happen yet.
There was a pause. ‘I’d better get on home,’ I said unwillingly, testing the feeling I’d just had.
‘I was hoping you’d let me buy you a coffee, or a cold drink or sumpthink.’
‘What, to help me get over the shock?’ I joked.
‘Nah.’ He looked at me over his shoulder. ‘We could talk some more.’
Suddenly the episode with Ed didn’t matter any more, except that it had led us up to this point, this meeting-point.
‘Okay.’ I kept my voice light, just in case nothing should come of it. But of course, something did. A whole lot did.
That meeting-day we were just friendly. He was so polite, that was what felt so good. And careful and kind. I wasn’t used to it. I was used to keeping up with Brenner, who sometimes paid compliments just to watch my face go all soft with gratitude, then snatched the compliment back and laughed at me. ‘Just joking! Geez, you’re so sen-sitive!’, like it was a major fault in me.
Another thing, Pug didn’t seem to be busting to get back to his mates. I kept waiting for him to make some excuse to get up and go, and he kept staying, and asking more questions. He hardly said anything about himself. He told me later he was embarrassed about having no job, and thought I’d disapprove about the boxing. He made me talk, though. He sat still and took me seriously. He listened and asked questions and didn’t make a single judgemental comment. I found myself saying things I hadn’t known I thought, drawn out by his interest. I found myself not having to bother about seeming cool or sophisticated, not having to worry about getting my tone right. I could just mag on, yarn on, take things back and restate them, disagree with myself. It was great.
For a while we had a casual kind of relationship. We only saw each other every week or so, and hardly ever left his room when we did. School got worse, and our meetings started to be the only nice times I had, and then the Christmas holidays started. God, was that an orgy of lies and sex! My ‘best friend’ Lisa was very handy during that time—even when she was away I could go for ‘long walks’ to ‘mope’ and ‘miss her’. That was when I really got to know Pug, seeing him almost every day. Pavement-sizzling afternoons, jacaranda-blue skies, pollution and bushfire smoke souring the streets, sunshine stinging: we sheltered in the shadowy must of that room in the share house, talking, sleeping, being together for hours. He turned out to be not quite so serious all the time as I first thought, but he is basically a serious and careful person, wrongly packaged in a boxer’s body. That’s when I got addicted to him, started seeing the point of sex, started realising what a dud Brenner had been.
Going back to school meant major deprivation after that. But if I didn’t have Pug I don’t know how I’d cope with all the school stuff—he gives me enough of a boost to keep me grinding on, day after day, walking there, weathering whatever, walking back, sitting at my desk working. He thinks it’s very important, me doing the HSC, more important
than I think it is, because I can’t see what it’s going to lead to. Haven’t a clue; don’t much care. It’s just … it’s there, and it seems slightly more pointless to stop than it does to go on. So I do.
I walk past Lisa and Kerry and Jasper Sceates at the bus stop. I’m halfway past and there’s deadly silence when Lisa sings out, ‘Well, hullo Melanie!’
There’s that teasing look in her eye. I just want to be far, far away, but I don’t speed up or anything. I give her a blank look, a Donna look, and go on past. I don’t say anything—I can just hear how she’d parrot it back at me.
They fall about laughing behind me. Jasper calls out, ‘Stackin’ on the weight a bit, aren’t ya?’ and the two girls shush him and Lisa says in a false voice, ‘Jasper! Don’t be so cruel!’
Stacking on the weight—I’ve never been bonier! Maybe that’s all he means, the opposite of what he said. But the way Lisa and Kerry reacted …
Well, stuff Jasper Sceates as well. Stuff all of them. Forget about them. Think about Pug, how he looks at you, how much you matter.
Because there was only me, and I was quiet and good, Dad took me places. I perched in the cabs of bulldozers, doodled on memo pads in factory offices, played with kittens in other people’s houses while above me Dad knitted deals with his talk of premiums and no-claim bonuses, fire, injury and acts of God. I was patient, too; I learned patience going out with Dad, being in a new place, exploring it to death, then putting in another hour until he was ready to go.
In some people’s faces you can see what they looked like as children, or the old people they’ll be, when the flesh padding has sagged and shrunk and the bones show through. With some people you can’t see far. I could imagine Lisa, for example, as a pretty child (she did show me photos, too), but I couldn’t imagine her any older. Mind you, she never stopped moving and talking—her face was hard to concentrate on because I cared so much what it was doing; I had to think about my own reactions all the time and get them right. I remember I had a hard time seeing Brenner sometimes, squinting through my image of him as a leathery old lifesaver striding manfully about on the beach, silly red-and-yellow cap tied under his chin. With Pug I can’t tell. He is just Pug now, that is, as I see him, inside the moment I’m seeing him in. I get so fixated on the details of him sometimes it’s hard to step back far enough to see his complete face, let alone reshape it in my imagination as a baby’s, as a man Dad’s age.
With my own face, it’s hopeless, too: a small face with too many odd, over-sized features crammed into it. When I see my face after looking at others it seems too convex, everything too curly: a mouth quirked into a kind of weird permanent smile, black eyebrows making flourishes over my eyes, a great tassel of wavy black hair, thick enough to swing me from. Everything off-balance, out of proportion.
And this bosom that’s growing on me’s the same; the rest of my body seems to be stretching out and getting thinner like a piece of chewing gum, while it swells and hurts and tingles and gets bumped and elbowed, because I’m not used to it yet; I forget where it ends.
I can’t tell where I’ll go, how I’ll change, what I’m going to look like next month, next year. I look and wonder, waiting for something to finish developing and start deteriorating so I can know, so I can relax.
Speaking of tension, I’m wound up with waiting for something else. I always feel as if I’m right on the verge of getting a period, but it’s been weeks, and one hasn’t come. I’ve had so many scares before, though, and they didn’t amount to anything. And the one time I should’ve been scared I didn’t feel a thing, didn’t even think until I was two months overdue, so …
Scene: LISA and ME at school, at edge of group.
LISA: You’re one of those pale people.
ME: Sure. Sickly pale.
LISA: Pale and mysterious. Like, you look kind of foreign, you know?
ME: Chinese? Tongan? Eskimo?
LISA (punching MY arm): Don’t be dumb. Like French or something! Like you ought to be wrapped up in furs in a carriage.
ME: Instead of slobbing round in jeans and a T-shirt in Newtown? Sounds good to me. Show me a fur and I’ll throw it on.
LISA (looking thoughtful): No, I’m just trying to home in, you know?, to your colours.
ME (looking down at clothes and pretending to be shocked): What, blue denim and frayed grey cotton aren’t my colours?
LISA: They’re everyone’s colours, so everyone looks like a nobody in them. You want something that’s going to make you stand out.
ME (doubtfully): I do?
Six weeks after fertilisation, extremely short arms and legs are visible. The red blob in the chest, a tiny heart, now beats about 150 times a minute, twice as fast as the mother’s. The eyes and brain can be seen easily. The embryo’s own blood supply, separate from its mother’s, is piggybacked onto it by the placenta, allowing the input of nutrients and the disposal of the embryo’s waste products. This second month of gestation is a sensitive time: even slight defects in the embryo can bring on miscarriage.
Sometimes my eyes get stuck out of focus on a particular spot and I really have to wrench them back, make myself move them around. This happens a lot when I’m trying to study. Study’s the worst thing. I write and write and write and read and read and read and nothing stays in my head. I got that History essay done, but it took the longest time. It was like trying to get a really dense, jumpy sheep through a really small gate. My thoughts just kept slithering and racing away. Hopeless. But one thing I have, without all these friends bothering me, is time; time to herd that bloody boring sheep through that and the dozen other bloody stupid gates you have to get it through to be ‘educated’.
Mum reckons while it’s like this (not so stinking hot now, officially autumn, but still sunny) we should go down to the beach house for a weekend. I don’t know. It’d be nice, I guess; I mean, it always is, but I don’t want to leave town. I don’t want to leave Pug. We always manage to get together sometime every weekend, and where would I be without my weekly ? In all other ways I’d love to go. Christ, there’s so much I’d like to get away from. I’d love to have a Friday and a Monday off school, a legitimate Friday or Monday, not a stolen one. But I think about a weekend with my family, and about not seeing, not touching Pug at all for two weeks straight (although I’d make it up somewhere, I’d lie, I’d say I had to go out with Lisa) … I can’t do it. I don’t want to.
Dad doesn’t seem all that keen either, which is a bit of a surprise. Usually he’s busting to get down there and fiddle around with fishing tackle or a boogie board. But he shrugs and says ‘Maybe’ in a dismissive, forget-it tone of voice, and Mum sighs impatiently. ‘What’s wrong with you two? Mel, go and take an iron tablet. You look as pale and peaky as a TB victim! You can’t tell me you don’t need a break—up all night with your head in a textbook!’ I just went and took the tablet, and didn’t go back. And nothing more’s been said about going away since then, thank God. Don’t make me do it, Mum, please, please, please.
‘You look fabulous,’ says Pug. He’s taking my clothes off.
‘It’s as if you’re opening a big present,’ I laugh.
‘Yeah, it’s like that.’
A minute later, ‘Never had a present that was wrapped up so complicated, but.’
I help him with the bra catch; the elastic’s stretched as far as it’ll go. I spill out—out, not down. I kind of sproing out, and suddenly I’m three centimetres closer to him. He puts both hands on me, and I feel as if I’ll go bananas, those poor old squished nipples uncrinkling into his hands. I close my eyes and bite my lip and he sort of groans into my neck. We fall onto the bed and without even getting the bra right off; my underpants are around my knees and I don’t know how he got in, but he did. Easy. Lovely boy. Lovely man, lovely man.
At seven weeks, brain cells begin to reach out and make contact with each other. Every minute, more than 100,000 new nerve cells are being created. The lobes of the cerebrum, where mental processes will ta
ke place and conscious activity will be decided, shine through the forehead skin, as yet unprotected by the cranium.
Less than 4 cm long and less than 15 grams in weight, at eight weeks the embryo possesses all its organs, all nearly fully formed. From now on they will become progressively more refined.
I meet Josh Lewis coming fast down our street.
‘Hi, Josh.’ I’m uncertain, thinking about Ambra.
He doesn’t say anything. A thin arc of his white spit crosses my path.
A noise like ‘pop!’ comes from my mouth and I stagger. I call out after him, ‘What was that for?’
He’s walking away as if nothing’s happened. What has happened? What does he know, or think he knows, to make him hate me? And who the hell else knows? I can hardly believe it, except for that splat on the path. It moves as the bubbles burst, like something alive.
… as a means of self-defence it is wholly absurd … a light blow delivered to the testes can render a man as quickly hors de combat, flooring him and causing him to lose all further interest in fighting, but without doing him any permanent injury leading to darkness, imbecility or the grave.
Yet the punch to the testes is barred and called a foul … while every wallop to the head and jaws, eyes, nose and ears, all of the delicate sensory organs, is hailed with delight and cheered, particularly when these blows bruise, maim, cut and tear.
Pug’s first pro match is in two weeks up at the Youth Club. ‘You gotta come,’ he says. ‘I want you to be there. You gotta see what it’s all about.’
‘You do? I do?’ I suppose I do. See what all this training is for. I couldn’t expect to watch rehearsals for ever, could I? I did expect it, though, when I consider.
Pug watches me hesitate. ‘Come on, mate. It’d really make a difference if you came.’
So I say I will. Christ, I don’t know how I’ll get out on a week-night. Or whether I want to. I don’t want to see Pug getting smacked in the head. If he could guarantee me a win, I’d go, no worries, but he won’t say, won’t talk about his chances. What if he’s creamed in the first round, knocked flat? I can see it so easily! I can see him flat out on the canvas like a starfish. He’d look just like he does when he’s asleep, only bloodier, only not private, not in the half-darkness under the frangipani, but out there under lights with the crowd howling and some bloody great gorilla standing over him. Everything in me says Don’t do it, but Pug’s committed now. In this part of his life I don’t have a say. To accept, to watch, to support him whatever happens; my role’s astonishingly clear. To keep my mouth shut on my own fears and tremblings, my own hysteria, to tell him he’s the best, with conviction, even when we both know I’m lying.
The Best Thing Page 5