Mrs Evans crept up on the rat as though it was completely unaware of her presence and she was an expert at killing rats with brooms. Heads craned forwards. A few girls walked towards her to get a better look. Then Mrs Evans brought her broom down with a crack, and the rat ran from it along the wall, changing direction suddenly, then again, and out through a crack in the far door, to the sound of a room full of girls screaming as hard as they could.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Rebecca lay in her pastel-striped bikini in the outdoor bathtub, her feet poking above the waterline at the bottom end, her hands swatting at flies at the top end with a folded orange place mat she had stolen from the kitchen.
‘I don’t know how you fucking stand it,’ she yelled to the sky. More water sloshed over the edge. She sank her head underwater and stayed there until she needed to breathe. ‘A pool instead of one bath would be a start.’
There were no clouds in the sky, only a great wash of blue. Rebecca had been told once by her cleaner that if you looked up and there was enough blue sky to make a lady’s apron, it wouldn’t rain. ‘There’s enough blue sky to make a whole city, a whole universe,’ she yelled.
The girls didn’t understand; they didn’t try to. The heat had stolen every ounce of energy. It was unseasonably hot, it said on the news. A heatwave for Easter instead of eggs. Meg, Eve and Sarah sat in the shade of the long verandah, sometimes sipping from tall glasses of water, sometimes putting down and picking up cards in their slow game of Uno. They would look out to the distance, past the fence surrounding the house, across the paddocks, across the moonscape: the pebbles and earth and patches of sharp, long, wheat-coloured grass. Apart from a handful of bent box trees in the distance, everything was low-rise.
Bill had left Nellie – Meg’s favourite dog, a black kelpie with tan eyebrows and paws – with them, and she lay on the steps of the verandah, watchful for any movement and smart enough to ignore Rebecca in the bathtub to the side of the house. He was due back at any minute. He had promised to get home early to take the girls into Bourke to pick up supplies for the party tonight. ‘Get yourselves something special, have a shop, buy some chips and treats, get a new tape to play if you want,’ he had told them.
Meg knew he was trying so hard.
Bill was having a barbecue for a few neighbours. Lots of meat, minimal salads. The Williams had the adjoining property. The Taylors would have to drive at least an hour, and the Finches nearly two, to get to Bullaburra station, but that’s what you did out here, Bill had explained to Rebecca, who was sprawled across the kitchen table that morning, her outside catatonic with boredom, her insides on fire with rage. ‘You make your own entertainment out here,’ Bill said, finishing the last of his coffee. ‘You girls will have fun. There’ll be other kids your age. You know, someone different to talk to in case you’re bored of each other already.’
He then kissed Meg on the top of her head, went through the laundry, grabbed his hat and walked out the back door to put his boots on.
Meg followed him out. ‘Thanks, Dad,’ she said, leaning over to pick up his hat. Bill had put it on the door mat so he could pull his boots on.
‘It’s nice to have people over,’ he said, squinting up at her, brushing nothing off his knees. ‘I get to make my coleslaw, do my secret marinade.’
‘Soy sauce, Worcestershire and a splash of beer while you’re cooking? Big secret, Dad. Huge.’
Bill stood up. He was nearly fifty, but he was still a big man, and he took up the doorway. Meg had her hand out towards him with his hat resting on it.
‘She’s a trick, that one,’ he said, motioning inside at Rebecca with his eyes before taking the hat and putting it on his head. ‘I didn’t know they made them like that.’
‘Told you.’
‘I know you did. I know. I thought you were just digging your heels in. You’re older now. I should have listened. I keep forgetting you’re not a little girl any more. You would have had a much nicer holiday, all of you would have had a much nicer holiday …’ Bill didn’t finish his sentence; he held the screen door open instead. ‘I’ll take your word for it next time, Meg.’
Meg walked past him and paused inside the laundry, the tiles lovely and cold on her bare feet. ‘I’m having a great holiday, Dad. Being here.’
‘I hope so.’
‘See you later,’ Meg said and then called through the netting as her dad slipped away. ‘Dad. Maybe we should do a vegetarian dish.’
‘Sure,’ he said, walking away, shaking his head. Meg could see the back of his hand stuck up in the air. ‘Great idea.’
Watching Rebecca in the bathtub was proving to be half-decent entertainment. The girls had been on Bullaburra station for two days and had two more to go. They had watched seven videos and written top-five lists about: favourite actors; what they would study after they left school; places to get married in; favourite children’s names; favourite teachers; favourite European cities; and items they would buy from Sportsgirl when they got back into the city. They had gone to bake cakes but decided it was too hot to put the oven on, so they ate the mixture instead.
Bill would drive them nearly a thousand kilometres on Monday back to Sydney and deliver Meg and Eve to Eve’s parents, Sarah to her parents in Sydney and Rebecca to her aunt.
‘Uno!’ Sarah said, holding one card up and waiting for Meg’s move.
Rebecca kept going under the water in the bathtub, thrashing her body around in the tight space, coming up for air and going down again. Then she abruptly pulled herself out of the bathtub and stormed past the girls into the house. Her feet trailed red mud. Red footsteps all up the hallway. They all looked at each other and the bathtub full of water. Inside the house, they could hear drawers opening and closing, cupboard doors banging, and then it went silent for five minutes.
‘What do you think she’s …’ Sarah stopped mid-sentence as Rebecca marched out with the plastic shower curtain covered in multicoloured fish under her arm and made for the bathtub. She placed it across the tub and the girls said nothing, because this was better than Knots Landing. Rebecca returned to the house and came back with a long pole used to open the high louvre windows in the living space, all the while her red footprints dotting the house and front garden. She surveyed the dust around her and set upon a tall, well-built stick – a branch by city standards.
‘Fucking stupid flies.’
She twisted the stick into the ground beside the bath, halfway along its length. Then she forced the louvre pole into the ground by the head of the bath, grunting with the effort. She draped the shower curtain over the makeshift supports and slid underneath it into the bath, to recline under a sky of cartoon fish.
Meg, Eve and Sarah laughed as one, their chairs creaking beneath them.
‘You right, Rebecca?’ Meg asked.
‘Why would you do it? Why would you live out here?’ A hand emerged from under the shower curtain and swirled itself around in the air. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Your father’s a spunk, Meg, and he’s stuck out here all by himself with flies. Flies and dust and sheep and crawling furry insects that travel in a line on the ground. I can’t believe he hasn’t topped himself.’
Rebecca’s innate abilities had become temperamental since arriving in the ‘shithole’. It was as though the heat and the boredom, the space and the isolation, were playing tricks, were turning her inside out.
‘Dunedoo? What a stupid name,’ she had said to the passenger window in the car as they’d driven through the town. ‘It looks like a toilet. It sounds like a toilet. It is a toilet.’
‘More road than town,’ Bill had joked to the three slumped girls in the back seat.
Rebecca was overheating. The girls ignored the moans coming from below the shower-curtain tent. Words couldn’t compete with the sight. Then the figure of Bill moved beside the shed. He walked slowly towards them, putting up his hand in acknowledgement and taking off his beaten hat.
‘I might have one of those,’ he said to the
girls on the verandah. ‘It’s a ripper out there.’
When he turned, saw his shower curtain over the bath and registered the voice within, he put his arms on the verandah rail and yelled towards Rebecca, ‘A for innovation, Rebecca. Should have done something like that years ago myself.’
Five minutes later, Rebecca got out of the bath, and ten minutes after that she emerged from the bedroom, dressed ready for the drive into Bourke. She hopped into the waiting car, and Eve was the one who said it. ‘You might need to stick your head out the window like Nellie on the way into town, Rebecca. You’re as red as a beetroot. You nearly suffocated yourself.’
The girls laughed. Rebecca sat in the back seat by the window staring down at the white line on the side of the road and didn’t move a muscle.
‘What can they still be talking about?’ Tom Finch asked the crouched shadows in a circle at the back of the shed.
It was 11.40 pm, and the adults were glued to their seats around the dining table, half with cups of tea, the other half making good work of the port, except for Mrs Williams, who was enjoying a few Midori and lemonades. They made her feel less dust-bitten, like she was by the pool in Ko Samui.
Tom and Meg had just stolen back into the house to find another bottle of alcohol and could hear the parents in the dining room involved in a conversation they couldn’t be bothered to follow. Something about train lines. Boring. Between the eight of them, the first bottle of sherry had disappeared within fifteen minutes. The sweetness had made Eve gag, but she’d taken another sip just to show she could do it.
Rebecca’s mood had picked up as soon as she’d spied Tom and his brother, Rob Finch, unroll themselves out of the car around 7 pm. They were back from boarding school for the holidays too. When Pat and Fraser Williams appeared fifteen minutes later, it was like the world, or at least Bullaburra, was a different place. Four boys, sixteen to eighteen years old, who had outgrown their fathers, had come home for the holidays, already sunburnt on their noses and shoulders. Fraser Williams had brought a backpack that he’d told his mum and dad contained compilation tapes and a jumper, in case an evening chill came. There were also a bottle of Scotch and two longneck VBs, all wrapped up in his mum’s tea towels so they didn’t clink in the car on the way over.
The earth radiated cool behind the shed, which sat a couple of hundred metres west of the house, and Rebecca started to rub at her bare arms. All the boys took in the sight of her sitting in the dirt by the shed, out here, within reach, the girl returned from Europe whom everyone at school would share their sightings of.
‘Rebecca Thornton and I have the same orthodontist. We were in the waiting room together yesterday.’
‘I saw Rebecca at the bus stop. I could see her bra through her shirt.’
‘Do you think Rebecca Thornton has done it?’
Sarah sat next to Rebecca and had worked out before dinner she was see-through. She was getting cold and hungry, too, and her bum was beginning to get pins and needles. Fraser took his jumper out of his backpack and put it around Rebecca’s shoulders before sitting down next to her, his knee slamming into Sarah’s thigh, causing her to inch her way to the right, out of his way. Rebecca whispered into Fraser’s ear, and he swung his head around to take in the bulbous shadow to his left. He leant over to Sarah and put his hands on the rolls on her stomach, then cupped one of her breasts.
‘Definitely more than a handful. I’d be suffocated in there.’
Rebecca slapped his arm playfully. ‘You’re cruel. Sarah is just cute and cuddly. Like a big teddy bear. With tits.’
They whispered and snorted again and inched themselves away from Sarah as though she was so heavy she might crack the earth underneath her, causing everyone to fall in.
The sound of sticks being broken and dry grass being ground down came from behind, and Tom and Meg produced a bottle of nearly full Baileys that had a crust of dried cream around the screw-top opening. Nellie and Bingo ran around and through the circle, sniffing under the occasional armpit and across the backs of necks.
‘It was the best I could do,’ Meg said, holding up the bottle.
The eight of them began passing it around and taking gulps from its mouth. Eve didn’t mind the taste. It was kind of like a milkshake. It was a shame this wasn’t her first drink of the evening instead of the Scotch and the sherry, their near-empty shells now leaning against a tree stump.
Even though it was dark, their eyes had adjusted and they could see each other. Beyond their circle, they could hear rustling in the bushes and the clicking of insects. There were scratching noises coming from inside the shed, which everyone ignored. A few bored sheep in the distance could be heard having their own get-together. The moon, not yet full, kept slipping behind clouds, and leaves rustled in the wind, sounding like rain, but that was just wishful thinking.
Eve put her head back and looked at the stars. She passed the bottle on to Rob and wondered whether he liked her. She wondered whether she liked him. Everything began to happen in fragments. Fraser and Rebecca began to whisper. Meg and Tom and Sarah were planning the next raid on the house. Rob raised his eyebrows at Eve either to thank her for the six-year-old Baileys or tell her he hadn’t a clue what was going on. Pat, the youngest of the group at sixteen, began a series of handstands against the shed wall, his heels hitting the side, making a noise like two saucepan lids clanging together.
‘Shut up, you dick,’ Fraser yelled, turning his head to the house. ‘They’ll hear you. I reckon we’ve got twenty minutes until someone works out we’re not playing pool out the back.’
‘Let’s do something,’ Pat said, upside down, his shirt hanging over his pink face. ‘This is boring, sitting around talking. What about spin the bottle?’
Rebecca groaned. ‘That’s for fourteen-year-olds, Pat. What about truth or dare?’ she asked, disappearing further into Fraser’s jumper. ‘But proper truth or dare, not pathetic truth or dare.’
The game began without consensus.
‘I dare Pat to run up to the house naked and touch the verandah,’ Rob said, leaning back on his hands and tilting his chin up.
The game then continued along gender lines: the boys dared and partook in the dares; the girls questioned. There were more nude runs, mooning, hitting another boy as hard as possible in the gut and climbing on the shed roof. The girls asked the boys which girls they liked. They asked each other who they hated most in their year. Rebecca asked Sarah if she thought Bill was a spunk. Sarah asked Meg if it was true that she never stayed for the holidays at her place, it was always Eve’s, because she didn’t like her mum. Meg lied and said she just didn’t want to spend her holidays in the city. Sarah took another sip of the Baileys – it was her favourite.
‘Eve?’ Rebecca asked, her hands hiding under the oversized rolled-up sleeves. ‘Have you ever masturbated?’
‘Rebecca, I’m not …’
There were sniggers, and Rob asked for someone to pass him the end of the Scotch.
‘Okay, then, is it true that you’ve had sex with two boys from Grammar this year?’
‘Shut up, Rebecca.’
‘Eve, you’re being a spoilsport. You have to answer or we will just assume it’s true.’
‘Rebecca, you’re being an idiot.’
Eve searched for definition in Meg’s face. She waited for her to pounce, but there was just a hazy outline of Meg leaning into Tom and grabbing the longneck of beer and tipping it so far back she looked like she was playing a musical instrument.
‘C’mon, Eve, answer,’ Fraser said.
Pat joined in, and then Tom turned from Meg and said it, and Rob, right next to her, so close she was touching his knee, came up the rear. ‘Answer.’
‘Maybe you’ll answer this one?’ Rebecca paused before continuing. ‘True or false: do you cut yourself when things don’t go your way?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Oooh,’ Fraser said. ‘Careful, she’s getting upset.’
‘Shut up!’ Eve yelled,
and then she stood up to leave and fell straight back down, just like one of the drunks outside the pub at closing time. Everyone laughed hysterically.
‘What the fuck is cutting yourself about anyway? I don’t understand,’ Fraser said, pulling Rebecca towards him. ‘With what? Scissors? How do you cut yourself with scissors? What do you cut? What the fuck is cutting yourself about?’ he repeated.
‘Shut up, you dickhead,’ Meg said, helping Eve to a sitting position.
‘Stop it. Stop it,’ Sarah said, getting groggily to her knees.
‘She looks like she’s about to topple over,’ Fraser yelled, pointing at Sarah.
‘Big boobs can be a blessing and a curse,’ Rebecca said. ‘Sar, don’t get worked up. It’s a game. It’s just a game.’
‘It’s not a game,’ Sarah said.
‘What should we be playing, Sarah?’ Rebecca asked. ‘The chocolate game? That would be fun.’
Sarah sat back down on the dirt.
‘Jesus, Eve,’ Meg hissed. Eve’s head was lolling on her neck. ‘Say something. Tell her to fuck off. Ask her if …’
Then, as Meg was trying to pull her up, Eve fell over a twig as big as a ruler and everyone laughed again. Meg couldn’t help laughing.
Eve sat on the dirt, feeling every individual particle beneath her. The breeze began to sting her shoulders. The moving grass; the insects chiming; Meg laughing, sprawled on the ground beside her: it was too loud. She tried to think of something to say to Rebecca. Nothing came. She reached out to Meg to help her up again, but she had no strength. It was like she was made of jelly.
‘Eve, this is not baby truth or dare. You’re in or you’re out,’ Rebecca said.
‘I’m out.’ It took all her energy to say the words. She needed to just sit for awhile, she thought, collect herself, and then she was going back to the house. She just needed a couple of minutes. Meg mouthed to Eve from the dirt. Get up. Say something. Eve?
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