Eve swam underwater with one arm out in front, the other arm behind her pulling the thin navy fabric over her bottom as best she could. She grabbed at the ladder and the Japanese teacher clumsily tried to wrap the towel around her before she was fully out of the pool. The bottom of the towel fell in the water. The crowd made noises that Eve had never heard before. Again, someone tried to settle them down. ‘Shush. I said that will be enough!’
Eve wrapped the towel tightly and stepped out of the water into silence and onto cold concrete.
‘Who was that?’
‘That was the funniest thing I have ever seen. I think I’m going to wet my pants.’
‘Did you see her white bum go up and down in the water like she was a bunny rabbit?’
The colour from the stands was so bright. Blinding bright. Eve could hear whispered parts of conversation and feel the delight as she walked, eyes down, with her towel sodden at the bottom, to get her backpack.
‘Is she crying?’
‘God, I would be bawling.’
‘It’s moon girl. The flasher.’
Eve could pick up bits of conversation as she walked to the change room, and bits were always the worst. Bits got under your skin, got stuck in your head. Bits were easy to remember. Like ad jingles.
Ms Waters found Eve waiting in line for the bus back to school. The pavement was hot, and already the girls had dried off in the afternoon sun. A few sat in the gutter, with their legs straight out in front, squinting, picking at their knees. All the bright primary colours had faded into muted streaks or just an odd-looking patch on the side of an arm.
‘You okay, Eve?’ Ms Waters asked, in a small voice this time. She put her hand on Eve’s shoulder. Eve’s chicken-wing bones poked back. The girls in the line all turned to see who the deputy principal was talking to. That girl.
Eve clutched her backpack to her front and nodded. She wished Ms Waters wasn’t touching her – now if she spoke, she might cry.
‘These things happen all the time. All the time.’ Ms Waters patted Eve’s chicken bone, and again her voice was soft and only meant for Eve. ‘So much happened today, it will be forgotten before you know it.’
Eve’s nod was small, almost imperceptible. ‘Okay?’
‘Yep,’ Eve said, wishing for the bus to come. ‘I better go and get the lost-property box to take back to school,’
Ms Waters said, then she turned to the tired girls with croaky voices scattered in the line and used her other voice. ‘Double-check you have everything, girls. If you’ve left something behind, run back and get it now.’ Then she boomed. ‘Quickly!’
On the return journey to school, Eve looked at the backs of all the wet heads in pairs in front of her on the bus. She put her backpack on the free seat next to her and pulled out her sports jumper. She slipped it on in the afternoon heat and kept shivering, looking out the window and wishing herself far away. She hated her mum. She hated her stupid cousin. For a second, she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t her whole bottom, just most of it. She sighed a sigh that was a scream for a person who didn’t want to be noticed. Then Eve pushed up the cuff of her jumper and pinched and twisted the skin on her wrist so it went red. No one was next to her; no one was looking. Tell me, she asked, twisting the piece of flesh until the sting from her wrist made her eyes water. Tell me what to do.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Eve woke before dawn and kept busy reading a biography of Katharine Hepburn. Her grandma loved Katharine Hepburn, and whenever Eve visited their place, four hours north in Glen Innes, they would spend hours and hours watching old movies. Grandma Kay would sit next to her on the faded olive couch and whisper hoarsely the dialogue as it came out of the mouths of Katharine or Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant. She would take a break during the dialogue of the supporting cast and suck on a Winfield Blue. Sometimes, the echo would get on Eve’s nerves, but she would just eat another Anzac biscuit or jam slice and keep watching.
Her grandpa would wander in every now and then to check on ‘his girls’. Always with an endless cup of black instant coffee in his hands, having sworn off tea because the British officers drank it in the Second World War – and the First World War, for that matter, he would say – while they ordered Australians ‘to get the shit kicked out of us’.
It didn’t bother Eve that she didn’t know what was going on half the time in the movies. Often, she would be imagining what it would be like to live in a place where it snowed and people ran inside from the cold, hung up their coats beside the front door and took off their gloves. She would imagine walking around in a long woollen coat, a scarf wrapped around her neck, her hands deep in pockets, her nose pink with chill, her feet treading in snow. Those coats and the snow. That’s where everything happened.
After breakfast in the dining hall, where the conversation centred around two things – the swimming carnival yesterday and where everyone was headed for their first weekend out on Friday – Eve busied herself fussing over her uniform until the next bell. She kept her mind occupied with minutiae: tie knot at second button on blouse, polish shoes, fold socks over once only. This morning, she was grateful for the uniform rules, glad to hear the bells.
The bells dotted her life as a boarder like chickenpox. All day, they would ring. They chimed for when it was time to get up, time to finish breakfast, time to leave the boarding house, time for dinner, bed, study, pick a zit. Usually, their predictability irritated Eve – that and the fact they were out of tune – but today she had only one thought: how could she face everyone in English this morning?
That cold feeling washed through her for the hundredth time. She was the girl who had flashed her bum in the race yesterday. Everyone was talking about her; she just didn’t know what they were saying, because every time she got close to somebody the talking stopped and the bodies became very busy doing something else.
The morning bell. A call to action, not thought. She began walking briskly to English with Mr Kelso. She kept her head down. She knew there would be jokes, whispering, rolling eyes. She wasn’t stupid. She liked reading, played a musical instrument and now she had shown the entire school her bum. All she needed was for her mum to come down and put her in a back brace for scoliosis for six months and then she would be eating lunch in the library by herself forever.
Head down, she heard a ‘Hi’. It wasn’t for her. Then another. Eve looked sideways. Standing next to her was Meg Patterson. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and her long limbs on a perfectly normal-heighted body were dangling like Betty Spaghetty. No ribbon in the hair, of course. Meg’s white blouse had ironing marks on it, her skirt was a little long and she was finishing off a banana.
Meg had never ignored her, but she’d never gone out of her way to talk to her, either. Now here she was saying ‘Hi’.
‘Hope he doesn’t go on and on about bloody split infinitives and the true signs of original thinkers again,’ Meg said, throwing her banana peel in the bin near the lockers.
‘Mmm. Same,’ Eve said, not believing this was the first interaction of the day. She had steadied herself for some flasher jokes or to hear people humming the theme from Jaws or see dozens of long witchy fingers pointing at her as she walked from class to class. But a conversation with Meg about Mr Kelso, a forty-four-year-old bearded man who wore his beige trousers too close to his armpits? Everyone said he had nappy rash under his armpits. It took a while for Eve to get what they meant.
Meg had been planning this one ‘Hi’ all morning. She had rehearsed in her head a few one-liners to say after she got it out of the way. When she’d seen Eve going up and down in the water, she hadn’t laughed like the girls beside her. She’d wanted to jump in the water and stop that girl from bobbing up and down, up and down. Every time her white arse appeared, Meg wanted to scream. How could she not feel it? How could she not know it was all going horribly wrong?
Meg had the feeling that Eve liked her own space. She only noticed her first thing in the mornings, when it w
as just the two of them awake in the dorm room. She would hear a rustle and the click of that torch and then a glow coming from under the sheet. She knew Eve didn’t want to draw attention to herself, so she didn’t want to make a big deal out of what happened yesterday. The best she could come up with was that ‘Hi’. It seemed normal. Nothing about the carnival, just say something to Eve.
‘Come in, ladies,’ Mr Kelso boomed.
Dana Coleridge walked past Eve and raised her eyebrows and did that ‘big smile, no teeth’ thing. Rebecca Thornton asked Eve if she was planning on a career in stripping.
‘Show me the calibre of your thought,’ Mr Kelso said, waving the girls inside his classroom. ‘The strength of your knowledge, the power of your arguments, the beauty of your creativity.’
He said this every lesson, and he may have been saying ‘Do you want fries with that?’. All the girls sat and looked at the miracle of a person who wore his trousers too high and didn’t even know it.
The bite marks were red and fresh, and the bruising was in the first stages of crossing over from purple to muddy yellow. The dog made no mistake with Bill. It had bitten his rump as hard as it could yesterday. Bill was fixing a fence with Dan when Dan’s kelpie, Rat, decided Bill was attacking his master. The two men were pulling barbed wire through the fence posts and had their bodies close and heaving, pulling and grunting, as the barbed wire was always difficult to thread. Rat leapt up and drew blood immediately, earning a kick in the guts from Dan.
Driving to Sydney all day Friday and sitting on his bum for ten hours straight had only served to aggravate it. The sweat and pressure had made his wound turn into trifle. Meg sat on a chair in the private courtyard of the serviced apartment that Bill had rented in Sydney for the weekend – their first weekend since she started at Hetherington – as Bill bent forwards in front of her. He leant against the wall with one hand, while holding on to the top of his underpants with the other.
‘This is bad,’ Meg said, making a hissing sound as she spoke. ‘Really bad.’
She had seen Bill wince as soon as he’d hopped in the car when he’d picked her up from Hetherington. Bill had refused to discuss it and kept talking about the special dinner reservation he had made at a restaurant in Darlinghurst recommended to him by Frank Williams. He’d kept telling her they were in for a treat – they had the last available table. He just needed to see to something, he’d said when they’d stepped inside the hotel room. Meg had walked in on him in the bathroom and seen him trying to patch himself up, twisting his large body around and trying to cover the wound with a large patch of gauze on the fleshiest part of his bottom via his reflection in the mirror. She’d scooped up the antiseptic and bandages scattered near the sink and told him they should clean it up properly outside.
‘Can we just do this quickly and without the chat?’ Bill said, holding firmly on to one side of his underpants, making sure he had at least one buttock covered. ‘Just put the clean dressing on, Meg. I should have done it myself.’
‘Dad, I saw you try in there,’ Meg said, nodding towards the hotel room. ‘You were mangling the whole thing up. You couldn’t see what you were doing. I reckon it needs a bit of fresh air on it – dry it up a bit. It’s all mushy.’
‘Do you now?’
Daylight was fading out in their little courtyard, being replaced by dusk and a few mosquitoes, and Meg went back inside without a word. Bill could see her through the sliding doors turning on the light and collecting an odd assortment of bits and pieces from around the apartment. Her steps were light and quick.
She returned and put her booty on the low table between the chairs: a towel, two bottles of Coke from the mini-fridge and some mosquito repellent. ‘This is what I think we should do. I’m leaving the antiseptic and bandages for a while, and I think you should sit on this plastic chair and get some air on it. See, it has no back in it down the bottom.’ Meg pointed at the opening in the back of the chair. ‘A perfect place to stick your bum through. I think it has been specifically designed for this purpose.’
She was smiling, and Bill smiled back. His hand went up to ruffle her hair, but he took it back just before he made contact.
‘Okay,’ Bill said. His right cheek was throbbing and mushy but life would go on. ‘But we have to leave here at eight or we won’t make it.’
Meg threw her dad the towel. ‘Let’s just sit out here for a while.’ Meg turned and busied herself with bringing over the other chair so Bill could take off his undies and settle into his chair in the right position.
Bill put the towel over his lap and tucked it in at the sides so he was covered. ‘This is dignified,’ he said, leaning forwards awkwardly.
They both laughed, and Meg kissed her dad on the forehead and handed him a Coke. They clinked the cans together and said, ‘Cheers, big ears.’ The sliding doors from the apartment next door slid open and shut but there were no voices. A few footsteps in leather-soled shoes, but no voices.
‘You seem to have it all sorted, Meggie,’ Bill said, taking a sip of his Coke. She had been away for a month and it may as well have been a year. Her hair had grown longer. He swore she was taller. She had been standing with all the other twelve-year-old girls waiting to be picked up for the weekend and he had burst inside when he saw the top of her head. He couldn’t see the rest of her yet, just the top of her brown hair. It was her part; he could see the part of her hair and the pure white scalp in a straight line underneath, and everything inside him leapt and then burst. She was talking to another girl. She was okay.
‘You sent me away to get it all sorted.’
Bill hated when she used that phrase, ‘sent me away’. Now his chest throbbed. ‘Don’t say I sent you away, Meggie. Don’t say that.’
‘I know you didn’t, Dad. I didn’t mean it.’
He thought ‘bugger it’ and stuck his big hand out and ruffled her hair. They talked a bit about school, the swimming carnival – Meg mentioned the girl whose bathers snapped mid-race – a bit about the farm and the town gossip. The town gossip was a short topic of conversation. Bill was useless at collating that sort of information.
It was growing dark, and the light from the courtyard next door was perfect. They sat next to each other in the shadows swapping pieces from their new lives.
Bill came right out and said it. He’d had plenty of time to think on the drive to Sydney and had kept thinking he had two days with Meg twice a term and he wasn’t going to let things go unsaid when they were together. Bill tried hard on the telephone, but it wasn’t the same. He couldn’t see her, see what she really meant. ‘Are you okay here, Meggie? I mean really okay?’
Meg put her Coke down on the table. ‘Dad, I’m good. It’s a little weird sometimes – all those girls, they never shut up – but I’m getting used to it.’
‘Are you sure?’ Part of Bill wanted her to say she wasn’t, and then he would have to take her back home. Look after her.
‘I get it, Dad. I get why I’m here.’ She stuck her hand flat on top of the towel on his thigh. He put his big hand flat on top of hers.
‘Must be strange going from the man with a bite on his bum to a room full of girls, Meg.’
Meg giggled and scooped her Coke from the table with her free hand and took a sip.
‘Sometimes,’ she said, dangling the can in the air. ‘Sometimes the girls are idiots, sometimes the boys are idiots.’
‘The boys?’
‘We see them every now and then at sport stuff on the weekend.’ Meg took her hand away and began to wriggle a bit in her seat. ‘The girls try to act like they couldn’t hurt a bloody fly, and the guys try to act like they could hurt anything they want to.’
Meg went on to tell her dad about a game of cricket from last Saturday afternoon and how, when she was waiting for an iceblock in line at the small kiosk, she got into a fight with a senior boy. ‘He just turned in the line, Dad, and said to Rachel – she’s in my year – “Are you Rachel Geddes? Your brother is a dickhead.” He’s
a senior, Dad. He’s a senior twice her size. He’s seventeen, maybe eighteen. What a dick.’
Meg stopped to kick a little white pebble back where it belonged.
‘Meg,’ Bill said, with suitable reproach.
‘Sorry. She was right in front of me, and it gets worse. He said to her, “I think being a dickhead may run in the family,” and Rachel just looked at him and he started laughing, and the guy next to him started laughing. And they had their stupid senior blazers on and were laughing.’
‘They sound like fools, Meg, to pick on a Year Seven girl, laugh at her. That’s not on.’
‘So I asked him why he wasn’t playing cricket out there and was it because he couldn’t catch a ball.’
‘Meg.’ Bill took in her skinny arms. Her bony shoulders. Her eyes looking right at him.
A rush of information began, and as Meg spoke Bill realised she was trying to get her version of events out quickly. For insurance.
‘And he asked me if I had my periods yet and I pushed him and his drink spilt down his blazer.’ Meg was talking fast. ‘It was just a drink. And a teacher came over and said she saw everything and Hetherington girls don’t “manhandle” people and behave like that and she asked my name. Just in case they say anything to you about it. He was an idiot, Dad.’
The light from the courtyard next door abruptly turned off, and they both readjusted to seeing each other’s faces in the dark. Crickets raged in the tastefully planted grass that ran the perimeter of the courtyard wall. Bill reached out his hand and grabbed Meg’s jaw. ‘What an idiot.’ He shook his head with anger and her jaw with love.
‘Just in case they call you or anything, the school calls you,’ she repeated. ‘They’re saying I should pay for dry-cleaning.’
Bill let go of Meg’s face and shimmied his bare bottom back, his towel held tight, into the hole in his chair. ‘He’s nearly a man,’ Bill said, rearranging his modesty towel. Meg’s body deflated on her chair with relief. Some eighteen-year-old boy, a man, in a blazer with his achievements embroidered onto his chest had asked his daughter in front of everyone if she had her periods. He deserved more than a drink down his front. ‘It’s not on,’ was all he could manage.
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