Under the Influence

by Jacqueline Lunn

  ‘No, Mum,’ Eve said, relieved the graffiti had been painted over before her mother could see it.

  Hillary let go. ‘Oh, Eve.’ She rubbed Eve’s shoulder. Back and forth. Back and forth. ‘Eve. Does Sarah know who did this?’

  ‘No. She looked after me, Mum. She looked after me.’ It wasn’t an out-and-out lie. Sarah hugged her and asked if she was okay. She gave Eve her custard the night the tomb was discovered and whispered nothing into Eve’s ear later. She did nothing, she said nothing to the teachers, but she was the only girl in the boarding house to make contact. Eve was grateful and furious for the contact.

  ‘I’m sure I can get you into another school for next year. Do you want to go to school somewhere else?’

  ‘No, Mum.’

  ‘Eve?’

  Eve stirred the top of her hot chocolate and tuned out when her mother began talking about the fact she was just a phone call away and could be in Sydney in three hours. The drama this had caused was making everything worse. She was the centre of attention because of the tomb. Everyone had their noses in now, and it was making everything bigger. Eve wanted it all to go away.

  ‘Are you sure about staying here, Eve? It’s a couple of phone calls, and I can get you into a very good school.’

  Eve stopped stirring. Meg was coming back soon. Just a year ago, it was her and Meg, and now she was sitting in this cafe with her mum, who didn’t have a clue what to do.

  ‘Yes, Mum.’ Eve knew her mother wanted to hear something more. ‘I’m okay, Mum. It’s a big, stupid mistake. I don’t know why they picked my name to put on all that stuff. At least it’s not there any more, Mum. I’ll call you if something happens, I promise.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When’s Meg back?’

  ‘In a month. On the seventeenth.’

  Wherever Eve went now, boys from Mitchell College would whisper at her.

  ‘Bend over for me?’

  ‘How many can you handle at one time?’

  ‘Who’s taking you to the dance?’

  There was no let-up now. Eve lived waiting for the next hit. When she wasn’t thinking of how to avoid Rebecca, she was dreaming up how to make her like her again. How to sit back in the circle with knees touching and the warm sun on her back. Maybe she could even get Meg to sit with them when she returned. It wouldn’t be long now, just weeks, and they could all sit together. Rebecca liked Meg, Eve remembered. Then she stuck a razor blade into her thigh.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Eve rested her forehead against the passenger car window and kept her eyes on the Newell Highway below, whipping her straight back to the main street of Tallow, where she would see Georgia and the lawyers and not know what to say.

  There wasn’t much to see in the dark. In the fan of the high-beam headlights, she could make out parts of the scene outside her window through slow-motion blinks: a crisp white line flanked by pockmarked bitumen on one side and the beginnings of claimed and used earth on the other. The steadfast, unbroken white line outside her window flicked and jumped and curved, never letting up. Eve pressed her forehead further into the cool glass of the window and remembered her father telling her to watch that line if she was driving at night on bush roads. Jim Hardy had a gift for telling safety anecdotes and cooking his special date and apricot loaf.

  ‘A lot of people watch the broken line in the middle of the road when they drive at night, Evie,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the centre line when they were driving home from a cousin’s place late one evening and Eve was now old enough to sit in the front passenger seat. ‘But it will end up disorientating you in the dark. When you can’t see past your headlights, keep an eye on the side line. It will tell you when you’re about to hit a bend. It’s a mug’s game only watching what’s right in front of you when you’re driving in the dark.’

  Jim wanted to protect his daughter from the world; he just chose the wrong threat.

  The Toyota’s headlights on high beam did the best they could in the pure dark of early morning, occasionally spotting the base of stubborn eucalypts or hitting the tops of squat bushes that had proved their strength by surviving fire, oil spills, drought and drunk drivers. It was like watching an old film reel: the flicking of light, the jerky moving images, black and then grey and then a line of white, black and then grey and then a line of white. Still, Eve almost felt soothed by the sameness of it.

  Every now and then, a semitrailer would hurtle towards them on the two-lane highway and Sam would turn the high beam back to normal, clutch the wheel a bit tighter and continue moving through the darkness.

  Eve and Sam had been driving for about an hour, and they had nearly two to go before they were back in Tallow – or an hour and a half if Sam kept driving like this. If Eve was in London, as long as she didn’t get stuck in a traffic jam on the M20, she would be halfway to Calais in France by now. All this space could be terribly inefficient.

  It was another half an hour, nearly 3 am, before a word was uttered inside the car. ‘This is weird,’ Eve said, in a cadence that matched a perky woman head to toe in pink with a chihuahua called Tickles in her handbag.

  Eve couldn’t stand the silence any longer and reached forwards to turn on the radio. Static filled the car until she picked up a station and Whitney Houston’s ‘The Greatest Love of All’ came bursting out. Eve didn’t see it but she could feel Sam’s eyes roll. She flicked it off.

  Red reflector lights on knee-high posts flicked by, and the car gained momentum. The roar of another semitrailer shook the car, and Eve stole a glance at Sam’s hands on the wheel. Fingers curled and grasping, they were solid and still. Eve’s eyes moved up to his biceps, where the hair disappeared and the skin became smooth and soft, and she could see a small, defined muscle on top of another small, defined muscle, and then his skin disappeared into a green T-shirt with the words ‘Hawaii Five-O’ on it.

  Then Eve saw herself in the passenger seat. Not for the first time since coming back to Australia, she had the feeling that she was above herself. This time, maybe she was clinging to the roof of the car looking down through a peephole at herself and the scene unfolding around her. She could see Eve fidgeting. She could see her calves getting goosebumps from the air conditioning under the dashboard. She could see her wonder about Kat, about the basics that were squealed down telephone lines after the birth: her weight, her length, the labour, who she looked like. Then she could see herself getting Meg off the phone during their last proper conversation just over five months ago. She could see herself listening to one of Meg’s messages on the answering machine and deleting it before she had finished speaking three months ago. Two months ago, she mouthed to Richard that she ‘wasn’t here’ and walked out of the lounge room on tiptoes as he said something to Meg on the phone about the weather. Eve told Eve to sit still, stop moving, stop thinking, go to sleep. Eve could hear herself but didn’t listen.

  She rummaged through the console between the driver and passenger seats and found a half-eaten packet of jelly snakes. Eve pulled out a red one and offered the packet to Sam. He shook his head, eyes in front, both hands on the wheel.

  ‘Can’t talk?’ Eve said, half a snake in her mouth, half in her hand.

  ‘Do you want me to talk?’

  ‘Not if it’s going to kill you. But I’m sure the rules state we’re allowed to talk after nearly two hours of silence.’ She turned to watch his profile in the dark. ‘We’re not betraying anyone by having a conversation.’

  ‘Sometimes, I have nothing to say.’

  Eve slipped off her yellow patent ballet flats and placed her bare feet up on the glovebox. ‘How long were you in Papua New Guinea?’

  ‘About a year.’

  ‘Do you have any brothers or sisters?’

  ‘Yes. Four.’

  ‘You know, you can always expand on your answers.’ She was pushing it. Pushing him. Waiting for a reaction. Waiting for something to turn this car around.

>   ‘Eve, don’t. You wanted to …’

  As Sam began to speak, a squat owl that looked like a feathered cannonball flew towards the windscreen. One second, it wasn’t there, and the next its huge eyes on a huge head were coming right for them. Eve sat bolt upright and screamed, covering her eyes and mouth with her hands.

  Sam swerved the car onto the other side of the road as the owl did a last-minute left. The tyres screamed and burnt with the sudden change in direction, forcing Eve’s feet to push up against the inside of the windscreen. Her seatbelt whipped her torso, and her hip hit the park brake, all within a second. Her body made a messy ‘S’ in the car.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Eve yelled at Sam’s shoulder. ‘Get back to our lane.’ She pointed frantically where she wanted the car to go. ‘Quickly. Now.’

  Eve was waving her hands inside the car as though the small gusts of air she was conjuring up would help push them to the other side. The beginning of two lights could be seen coming towards them.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Sam said, steering the car – which was now half in the oncoming lane and half across the shrub-strewn hard shoulder– back to its proper place.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so bloody calm,’ Eve snapped when they were safely back on their side of the road. ‘Haven’t you ever learnt you should never swerve for any animal when you are driving? It’s more dangerous to swerve than to run them over. We could have been hit by that truck.’ A semitrailer hurtled past them that second for emphasis. ‘We could have slammed into a tree. We could have skidded off the road and rolled the car.’

  ‘We’re okay, Eve. I have never seen that in my life. Ever. It was flying into the windscreen. It was instinct.’

  ‘Losers who are sure they are going to win the Lotto this week listen to instincts. I thought you were a good old country boy. What did they teach you out here? To scull beer, drive into trees and say “mate” three thousand times a day?’

  There was a tilt of the head and the thinnest intake of breath betraying the fact that Sam was deciding whether to go down this path with Eve. Then his instincts made another decision. ‘Do you ever turn that gaze on yourself, Eve? Or do you just save it for the riff-raff who can’t afford to holiday in the French Alps? It must be annoying having your perfect life disturbed, and here you are, all the way back here, so far away from the people who really matter.’

  Bugs and particles of earth looped and twirled through the headlights, occasionally emitting sparks of light, occasionally hitting the windscreen and being crushed to death. Eve wished she was back in London, where insects were hard to find and everything was contained and smaller. Even emotions.

  She pulled her shoes back on her feet as though she was about to go to the shops for some bread and milk. Her shoes shone in the cabin.

  ‘You know –’ she said.

  ‘Shh,’ Sam ordered.

  ‘I was just going to say –’

  ‘Shh. Can you hear that?’

  When Eve stopped talking, a rhythmic crunching and thumping sound could be heard coming from the bonnet. The speedometer read 130 km/h. Eve swore she could feel the car begin to rattle. The sound did not let up, and Sam slowed down.

  ‘It doesn’t sound right. I think I should pull over.’

  Sam turned off the road, to the left of an old eucalypt that was standing tall and wistful and loyal, and drove straight through a barbed-wire fence.

  ‘Shit! I didn’t see the fence,’ Sam yelled.

  The sound of metal and wood scraping and twisting, colliding and fighting, pierced their ears. The car bounced up and down like a ride at the show.

  ‘Bugger,’ Sam said between clenched teeth as the car bunny-hopped to a stop in a paddock. The headlights shone straight out across blades of grass and small stones. About a dozen sheep caught in the spotlight looked up lazily and then went back to sleep, as though little white cars drove through the paddock at night all the time.

  Eve opened the door and jumped out, straight into a squat, wiry bush that bit her ankles.

  ‘Shit,’ she said, hopping onto firm, barren ground and grabbing the hot bonnet to steady herself. The front of the car had barbed wire clinging to it. An ironbark fence pole was uprooted and leaning near Sam’s door. ‘What is it?’ Eve asked in the dark. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Sam grabbed a torch from the boot and opened the bonnet. With the flashlight held in his teeth, he examined the engine.

  ‘What’s the noise?’ Eve leant in.

  ‘This means absolutely nothing to me,’ Sam said, staring at the engine and sounding like he had a mouth full of lollies. ‘I don’t know what I’m meant to be looking for.’

  ‘Sam, I’m sorry about before,’ she said, close to his ear in the dark. ‘Sometimes, I say things I shouldn’t. I seem to be a natural at it.’

  He turned, allowing Eve to take the torch out of his mouth.

  ‘The noise sounded like it was coming from over here,’ she said. Eve went over to the right-hand front wheel and squatted, shining the torch at the inside rim. ‘Do you think this has anything to do with it?’

  Sam peered over Eve’s shoulder, and wedged between the wheel and the inside rim was a piece of bark the size of a skateboard. It had been thumping on the metal as the wheel rotated. Sam pulled it out and threw it across the paddock. ‘It must have become lodged when we, when I, swerved off the road.’

  Sam went back to the driver’s side and removed the fence post hanging from the door, then turned the humming engine off, leaving the headlights on to confirm they were in the middle of nowhere. They stood on either side of the car. The smell of fresh earth replaced the smell of exhaust.

  They both looked up at the sky, arms crossed. There were layers of stars. Eve didn’t remember seeing that before: 3D stars. She had read somewhere that the most stars the human eye could see at night were two thousand. Whoever put that in their thesis hadn’t been here.

  Sam let some time pass before he spoke. ‘If she just didn’t get in that car with that guy. If she just told me she had a baby. We haven’t spoken much this past year, but I should have known. That’s why the job in Tallow. I could have done something. I can’t believe she didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I can. Meg can keep secrets, Sam. She’s good at it. We’re both good at it.’

  Sam looked over at Eve and opened the back door to pull out his navy cotton jumper. He passed it over the roof, and Eve slipped it on without saying a word. It was long enough for her arms. All Sam could make out were Eve’s pale skin and pink lips. Her hair and body had melted into the night sky behind. The air was chilly, and when Eve spoke tiny insects tried to leap into her mouth.

  ‘When I was, I don’t know, about thirteen or fourteen, the year Meg went overseas, I had some problems at school,’ Eve said. Sam continued leaning against the car, sensing now was not the time to look directly at her. She might stop talking. ‘Girl stuff. You know.’

  ‘I don’t know, actually.’

  ‘Right. How do you explain girl stuff? Can’t really. Can be anything, I suppose.’ Eve snorted, banging her rump against the door as an exclamation mark, indicating equal parts foolishness and exasperation. ‘I’ve never told anyone this. This girl, well, she kind of took a dislike to me, and, I don’t know, it became a school sport, an extracurricular activity, to hate me. To see who could do it the best, who had a gift for humiliating me. I didn’t have a great year. Everyone else had kind of ignored the situation, and Mum and Dad panicked when they finally worked out what was going on. Like any self-respecting fourteen-year-old, I told them everything was fine.

  ‘Sarah kind of disappeared. She wasn’t able to do anything. That’s not the kind of person she is. It would have been hard to stick with me.

  ‘When Meg came back, she knew immediately something was wrong. The very first morning I was with her, she asked me what was going on. She had been away for a year, and it was the first thing she asked. She didn’t ask about teachers, or who was sharing a room with who in the boarding house, or how t
he cello was going, or if everyone had their periods now. First thing. I’m not exaggerating. It was like she could see right through me. I told her what had been happening. Well, kind of. Not everything. Enough. I begged her not to do anything because I still thought we could be friends with this girl. Sad, hey?’

  ‘It’s a weird time,’ Sam said, trying to keep up with everything Eve was saying.

  ‘Anyway, I begged her to do nothing. Begged. It wasn’t as bad when she came back. I had a person – Meg, of all people – and Rebecca eased off, wasn’t as obvious. And then Meg caught me …’

  – Eve paused, pulled Sam’s jumper tight and looked up at the holes of light – ‘cutting myself.’

  Sam nodded, attempting to understand.

  ‘Stupid thing. Sometimes, I would cut myself, my thigh. I don’t know why … looking back. It’s a long time ago. I feel stupid mentioning it.’ Eve’s story was splitting into fragments; the gaps were being filled in her own head with questions of why these words were coming out of her mouth now.

  ‘Don’t. Don’t feel stupid,’ Sam said, remembering all those tiny slices on Eve’s thigh as she emerged from the shower in the motel room. He winced. ‘Fell out of a tree.’ He should have known: such fine, delicate, thoughtful scars.

  ‘Meg cried when she caught me. I’d never seen her cry. She climbed over the cubicle wall and sat on the toilet floor in front of me and made me promise I would never do it again. She told me to go and cut Rebecca if I had a problem, not myself. That’s so Meg.’ Eve laughed, shaking her head. ‘The next day, she found Rebecca and said something to her. Rebecca stopped hassling me completely and moved on to someone else, and the next year she left the school. Went to Germany with her family. Meg said, “Good riddance. Germany can have Rebecca.”

  ‘Meg was so happy to come home after her scholarship, back to Australia. She didn’t want to go anywhere ever again. For all her, her … fire, she was happy with little, bloody isolated Australia on the other side of the world. Everyone thought it was such a huge honour, such a huge adventure for a little Australian girl, but I think being that far away was torture for her.’