by A. J. Betts
‘What’d you expect?’
He’s halfway through his second beer when Jasmine opens herself another bottle and throws the cap at him. ‘Stop being a prat and ask me to be your model.’
He avoids her eye, concentrating instead on his thumb as it bumps along the ridges of the bottle cap. Jasmine wasn’t the female he’d been thinking of.
‘Come on, I’m happy to,’ she says.
‘Give yourself a wrap. Claudia Schiffer wannabe.’
‘Prick!’
‘Short-arse.’
‘Wanker.’
‘So? Hippy.’
‘Loser.’
‘Vegan.’
‘Vegan is not a dirty word.’
‘Dirty vegan.’
‘Cyclist.’
‘What?’
‘They say cyclists have little penises, from all the friction. And erectile dysfunction is a common condition in the cycling world. I read that in Men’s Fitness.’
‘Why were you reading Men’s Fitness? And who the hell did the research?’
‘Is it true?’
‘Don’t know. I haven’t shagged a male cyclist.’ He finishes his second beer and wonders if he should have another.
She opens one for him before he can decide. ‘So where do you want to take these photos of me?’ she says. ‘Inside or out?’
‘Geez, you’re a bossy shit.’
Jasmine’s standing now, backpack in one hand, beer in the other. ‘Do you want my help? Or can you pass art without me?’
‘Okay.’ He gives in, not wanting to fight her. ‘You do the posing and I’ll just press the button, okay? Let’s get this done so I can sleep.’
‘Inside,’ she says. ‘Trust me.’
12
When Jasmine draws the heavy blinds across the windows, the curtain rails squeak with complaint. Dust particles unsettle and float about her. The lounge room is aquiver with the airborne secrets of fifteen years. The blinds block out the afternoon sun, shutting out everything. She plugs in the small tungsten lamp she’s brought with her from school, puts it on top of the television and angles the head until it’s pointing at the coffee table. She turns it on and amber light beams purposefully into the centre of the room. The air is the colour of honey, dust floating within it.
All of the familiar objects soften in the diffused light, their corners losing their sharpness, until Dustin no longer recognises the lounge room as the same one he’s spent his life eating dinners in. Outside, the world could end and they wouldn’t know.
‘Where do you want me?’ she asks.
Dustin feels shaky.
She has her hands on her hips. If the room looks foreign to him, so does Jasmine. The light plays tricks with what’s familiar. Things take on new meanings. She’s suddenly more sizeable than he remembers.
‘Shit, I don’t know. You tell me, you’re the director.’ He’s still spun out by the orange smokescreen of this new world.
Again, she moves slowly about the room, sipping on a beer, unintimidated by the unknown. She views objects with an artist’s eye, appreciating the way light reflects off surfaces and criss-crosses against floorboards. She admires how shadows fall. She’s always had a way of seeing things he doesn’t but today he thinks he sees them too.
Sitting on the rectangular coffee table in the centre of the room, she brushes a piece of amber hair from her amber lips and smiles.
He doesn’t smile back. It’s strange enough to see his best friend here at all, let alone sitting on Ken’s coffee table. It’s wrong to have anyone here in a space normally reserved for television dinners and monotonous silences. Let alone a girl! What would Ken say? Dustin feels the beer going to his head.
Is she waiting for me to take a photo, he wonders. He bends his knees and sits on the edge of the couch, unsure of what to do next. He digs his hands into his backpack, grabbing for the camera at the bottom. He unscrews the 250mm lens from the front — he won’t be needing this here, so close. He fiddles with the lens, dropping it twice onto the lounge. His fingers aren’t working as they should.
The first thing he notices when he looks through the viewfinder is the white school shirt lying on the wooden floorboards. He pauses on it, registering.
Two bare feet are next to the white fabric, toes wriggling. There is dark nail polish on each of the toenails, which he doesn’t recall seeing before. A thin silver chain hangs loosely around her left ankle. He’d never noticed that either. He lowers his eyes to his own feet, waiting for instruction. He feels control slipping away from him.
‘I thought you might need some help,’ she says.
Help with taking photos? Or something else?
In his mind flashes the memory of red-and-white striped underpants. Heat rushes through him and his face prickles.
Jasmine sits waiting, looking down at the dust between the floorboards at her feet. Her painted toes wriggle, unnerving him more.
‘It’s okay,’ she laughs, partly mocking, partly reassuring. ‘Lots of photos are like this. You can look.’
He lets his eyes rise up to see her sitting on the coffee table in a white bra and school skirt. She grins with her lips closed and he hardly recognises her. The camera’s heavy in his lap, waiting.
‘Dustin, this is what we do in art. We study lines and forms. We study people.’ She taps the ball of her right foot against the floorboards. ‘I want you to study me. Photograph me like this.’
He reels. Even her voice is different.
Light reflects off her collarbones and shoulders, leaving shadows on her neck. Her bra is cotton, with small fragile flowers sewn onto the straps. Yet she sits upon the coffee table, exposed and confident, waiting for him to photograph her. He doesn’t know how to.
‘It’s okay. It’s natural. It’s what’s supposed to happen.’
She’s not the candy-striped Jasmine anymore. He wonders if it’s the beer or something else. He half-hopes she’ll just erupt into laughter, put her school shirt back on and punch him. But instead she sighs, closes her eyes and reaches her hands behind her back. She unhooks her bra clasp and removes the straps from her shoulders. She stares right at him, dead on, and he wonders if she’s daring him.
‘Photograph me.’
He realises it’s not a dare; it’s an appeal.
He lifts the camera again, seeking her face. It’s only then, when he holds the viewfinder up to her, that he sees what she wants him to see — a face, unconnected to the rest of her. A face in a square frame, staring down the lens. Suddenly Jasmine’s face is more than just a part of her — it’s all of her.
He takes a shot, then another and another. The frame counter rolls on, each photo revealing something more. She peels the bra cup away from her left breast, then her right, and lets the soft amber-coloured bra fall into the space between them.
‘You’re mental,’ he tells her.
The room is spinning and his chest burns. He feels like he should hug her. But it’s her that holds him, like she’s catching him from falling. Her voice is in his ear.
‘Just kiss me.’
And so he does. With her fingers, she closes his eyes for him. He can feel her fingertips rest there against his eyelids while she kisses him back. She tastes of beer and honey. Every feature of her mouth is familiar — top and bottom lips, her teeth, her tongue — as though they’ve kissed before. He already knows the shape of each part of her.
‘Why has this taken so long?’ she whispers.
She cups his face in her hands and leans her forehead against his. Head to head, they breathe each other’s air.
It’s Jasmine who eases him into the lounge chair, as though she’s not as nervous as he is. He’s shaking and she giggles at him, calming him with her hands. She lays him down on his back and sits on top of him, her small breasts dangling above him. There is nothing to stop them doing anything. Or everything. This is surreal, but he’s going with it. She’s warm and soft against him, the way he’d always known she would be.
; ‘Jasmine?’ He says her name to remind himself.
‘Yeah?’
‘Just checking.’
‘It’s me. It’s still me.’
He grins and lets his head rest back on the lounge. They look at each other with wonder.
‘I thought you were supposed to be helping me with my assignment.’
‘Fuck the assignment,’ she says.
‘You can say that again.’
‘Fuck it.’
He rolls them both over so he’s on top. As they kiss, Dustin’s knees grind into the couch — the couch that Ken eats his dinner on, where he sits and watches TV. He loves the thought of having sex on Ken’s boring couch. He stretches at her undies to take them off, and she stops him.
‘Wait.’
‘You okay?’
She falters for a moment, suddenly uneasy. He feels it too. ‘This is fast.’
‘I know. Do you want to stop?’
‘I just didn’t think it would happen this fast.’
‘Did you think it would happen?’
‘Something at least. This is something, hey?’
‘This is something.’ He feels the momentum of it keep rolling. It’s a wave between them. ‘Should we keep going?’
‘I don’t … do you have a thingy?’
‘What?’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘A condom?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh. Do you?’
‘Would I be asking you?’
They pause, his weight on top of her. The skin at the top of her forehead is moist with sweat. The couch fabric feels humid and sticky.
‘I’m not going to …’ ‘I know …’
‘I can’t …’
‘I know …’
She relaxes and rolls to one side. Dustin knows they could back away from this now and go to school tomorrow like nothing had happened. Nothing needs to change between them.
‘Your dad.’
‘What?’
‘Your dad would have some …’
He groans. ‘Don’t even say it …’
‘Yeah he would. Everyone does.’
‘Not everyone.’
‘He would. Go check.’
There’s absolutely no chance of Dustin looking through his father’s drawers for condoms. The possibility of Ken having any is beyond comprehension. No. No way. Besides, he’s never gone into his father’s room for anything, and he isn’t going to start now.
Jasmine lifts herself up onto an elbow and stares at him with wonderment.
‘Are you saying you’d rather miss out on sex with me than search your dad’s cupboards?’
‘No. Well, yeah, but don’t say it like that.’
‘You wimp.’
He laughs into the lounge and feels their bodies relax against each other. Their combined smells hang in the heavy air about them. Jasmine’s face has become familiar again, except with rosier cheeks.
‘I’m going in then,’ she says.
‘Shit! You serious?’
‘Yeah why not? It can’t be that scary. I’ll go.’
‘Really? For me?’
‘No,’ she exclaims dramatically, ‘for me.’
She punches his shoulder and he watches her walk away, her curly brown hair falling across her small shoulder blades. He covers his face again with the palms of his hands and shakes his head with the amazement of it all. He’s not going to fight this.
‘Dustin?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve got some. There’s a cupboard filled with boxes of them.’
‘Fuck! Really?’
‘I don’t know. Which one’s your dad’s room?’
‘Geez! Keep going till the end.’
Jasmine slips through the hallway. She opens the first door out of curiosity. A toilet. The second is a bathroom. The third is a bedroom with built-in wardrobes, a single bed, a desk and a bookcase. She sneaks in, already recognising the smell of Dustin. It’s not what she would call a ‘homely’ room. There aren’t even any pictures on the wall except for a few of a woman stuck to a corkboard. She leans in closer, imagining this is Dustin’s mother. She can spot some similarities between the two of them but the photos don’t look old enough to have been taken fifteen years ago. And the woman has a red motorbike.
Jasmine closes the door behind her and moves down the hallway. She opens the last door quietly and walks inside.
Dustin’s father’s room is painted green. His duvet cover is grey-checked. His space is more cluttered than Dustin’s. The blinds are angled to let daylight in but the room is cold. Jasmine sees herself in a mirror and shivers. She’d forgotten how naked she was. She suddenly feels that she shouldn’t be here, not like this. She doesn’t want to look through this man’s bedside drawers anymore. She crosses her arms across her bare chest. In this room, too, there are photographs.
There is a black-and-white wedding photo in an old silver frame. In another, there’s a photo of a baby in a cot. The boy — Dustin — is so small, with long delicate eyelashes on his closed eyes. Jasmine wishes she could touch him like that, as a baby, and to tell him that everything is going to be okay. But she’d be lying. What happened to his mum — to die the way she did in a car crash — was terrible.
Jasmine sits on the duvet and slides open the top drawer of the bedside cupboard. There are phone bills and pens.
The second drawer has a watch, a torch and a twelve-pack of Ansell condoms. She picks two nervously from the half-empty box and wonders if he will notice their absence. She slides the drawer shut and for no good reason opens the bottom drawer.
This drawer is messier than the rest, filled with papers and magazines. There are three issues of Ralph and five CDs. And there is a letter to Ken from someone called Meg.
Some objects are not meant to be found. Some things are meant to remain in bottom drawers, hidden away from curious people who don’t know any better.
Jasmine reads the letter and it changes everything.
When she re-enters the dim lounge room she’s startled by the flash of a camera. Blinded, she swears and drops the condoms. Dustin laughs out loud at the funny photo of her yet to be developed.
She bends to pick up the condoms as he keeps taking photos. ‘Stop it!’ she shouts. He stops.
‘It’s not funny, Dustin.’
‘I’m not laughing. What the hell … I was just taking photos. Like you wanted me to.’
‘Not like this. Do you know what would happen if someone saw those photos? Geez, Dustin, what the hell were you thinking?’
He’s speechless. He knows what he’s thinking now. All of this — the lift home, the beers, the condoms — had been her doing. She was all over him before she left the room, then turned into a bitch when she came back.
‘You shouldn’t scare me like that,’ she says.
‘You shouldn’t be scared.’
She crosses her arms in front of her breasts. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Not this. She wasn’t supposed to read that letter from his mother, long dead, a ghost in a bottom drawer. This house is riddled with secrets. ‘Chuck me my shirt.’
‘Get it yourself.’ He walks to the kitchen to pour himself some water.
‘Don’t get angry at me,’ she says as she dresses hurriedly. ‘I’m not the enemy, remember?’
He drinks while she leaves. Right now everyone feels like the enemy.
11
He waits until the sound of her car wanes and his heart calms. He waits until the smell of her fades and the tension flows from him. It doesn’t. He leaves the house anyway.
His mountain bike doesn’t do his anger justice. There’s no noise to deafen him and not enough speed. The Avanti isn’t a motorbike and it will never be enough. He needs to ride that Ducati to feel good. Everything else will be disappointment. He spits — the taste of Jasmine had been bothering him — and the wind whips her from his lips. He pedals fast along Railway Road toward the house where Terri Pavish lives.
He leaves
his bike in the driveway and approaches the blue door with a new confidence. He knocks loudly and the cat answers, pushing through the cat flap, rubbing at his calf. He knocks again. There’s music coming from a window upstairs. It’s a Ben Lee song and it urges him on. His third knock is left unanswered, but he’s come too far to be turned away empty-handed.
The house is made of weatherboard and the second storey isn’t too far up. He knows he could do it, using the powerbox as a foothold. So he does.
He lifts himself and hauls his body through the bedroom window with a deftness that surprises him. Landing smoothly isn’t as easy. His foot hooks on a crystal charm hanging from the window’s latch, making the string stretch and break. Small crystals bounce and scatter on the polished floorboards. He swears and picks himself up.
The reality of being in her room overwhelms him. This is more than he’d expected. The walls are pale blue and smell of fresh paint. The double bed is half-made. Clothes are slung over the bedend. CD cases are lying open beside the stereo. On a shelf, there’s make-up, notepads, tampons, a Bendigo Bank statement and a half-used candle. Undies lie on the floor, and it’s the sight of them that makes him stop and take a breath. He’s not supposed to be here. He feels a rush of blood to the head.
From the back of his mind, comes the whisper of a word — stalker.
He walks down the stairs to the bright red kitchen with yellow flowers. Colours bounce from surfaces. He takes in everything: the fruit in the blue bowl (fuji apples, passionfruit, grapefruit); the magnets and notes on the fridge door; magazines on the sofa; a striped mug and bowl in the sink; Fairtrade coffee beside the plunger. He understands all of her.
As he goes to leave, his eyes snag on a diary lying open on a table. He probably shouldn’t look, but there’s nothing to stop him. There’s so much to know of her, at his fingertips.
Today is marked with pencilled reminders: lawn bowls shoot 11am, press meeting 3pm, Jo and Sal for drinks at Sail and Anchor 6pm, BikeMania 8pm. He picks it up and flicks through the previous two months, intrigued by the number of motorbike stores written in like appointments. She must be more obsessed than he is.
His mobile phone tells him it’s almost six. Leroy pushes and purrs against his legs as Dustin considers his choices. There is no choice.