I bunk third period and go to the toilet block. I take the cubicle at the end and light a cigarette. There is the hiss of the cistern and the smell of bleach. A half-dissolved cake of lemon air freshener hangs from a pipe.
I chip the wood with my fingernail. FTW. But it’s lost among the others. Bury me dead – Fuck me pregnant. I was here but now I’m gone, left my name to turn you on. David and Louise 4 eva.
I smoke and pick pea-green paint from under my fingernail and think about when I was a kid and how when I made a mistake on the first page of a new exercise book, I’d tear it out and how, after awhile, there’d be no pages left because I kept on making mistakes, and I think about my typing teacher, who doesn’t know my name but still likes to criticise me for not doing margins right, and the PE I despise because it means showing my thighs and there is always the chance that the PE teacher, Mr Whitmore, will duck into the girls’ changing sheds to tell us to hurry up, even though we just got in there and how he pretends not to look only he does, and the sentences I can’t finish and the poetry and maths I don’t understand and the science elements I am always forgetting, and this brain that just doesn’t want to seem to work. I think about the boy in my class who says Nathan Warner thinks I am pretty but too fat, and how my hair is a mess, like my handwriting and clothes and netball playing skills, which I take to mean you, Rachel, you are a mess, and Mr Hyde, the science teacher, who tells my friends I look better without make up and who likes to send me outside for talking in class when I am not the only one to do it. And how I know he really wants me to stay after class. There is a little room, a dark little room, that separates the two science labs which has faded posters of the chemical elements and scorched glass beakers and Bunsen burners and broken test tubes. I know he wants to take me in there and lose control.
*
I starve myself. I begin to get thin and happy. Then my mother cooks sausage pie for tea and says I must eat it. Afterwards, I throw it up in a plastic bag in my bedroom.
Sometimes I throw up in the shower. Chunks get caught in the stainless steel of the plug hole so I have to mash them up to make them go down. One time, I even go to the school over the back fence and throw up on the doorstep of a classroom.
I buy a dress from a Salvation Army shop on Colombo Street for seven dollars. It is mermaid green and has a metallic shimmer. I re-sew the seams so it fits me like a glove. I wear it on Friday nights.
Kerry’s Mum says I have lost my puppy fat. I feel off my head like on thinner or glue.
Then my sister finds out what I am doing and calls me a cheat.
*
In the hallway, the dog yelps in her sleep but everyone else is quiet so I do my trick and open the window and leg it across the garden. I go up Selwyn Street, onto Milton, then across Sydenham Park.
When I get to Hutchinson Street, Alastair is sleeping but Trent is awake. They only have one record, MeatLoaf – “Bat Out of Hell” so we listen to that.
Then we are into it.
It is the very first time I am touched. His hand passes over my skin and I imagine I can feel the valleys and crosses etched into his palm. His breath is hot in my ear, then hot in my mouth.
He takes my hand and presses it against himself. The skin is loose and silken, like the belly of a baby. Then he is on me, interlocking his fingers with mine, like they do in the movies, and searching me out and pushing gently backwards and forwards until I yield and open up.
Later, on the way to school, I ask my friends if they can tell.
Then one day the form head, Mr Fogerty, stops me in the corridor. He tells me that maybe I should consider going to another school or no school for that matter. He tells me that I am leading the others astray. He points to the four studs along my ear.
“And you can take those out.”
I watch him walk off, with his polished black shoes clipping the floor and his good posture and nicely ironed shirt and straight blue tie.
*
The letter from the school arrives before me. My mother waves it in my face.
“You’ve been bunking!”
“I haven’t.”
“What rubbish!” she yells.
I am sent to my room. So I open my window and take off.
Three
I DO NOT take much, just a bag with my smokes, walkman and four dollars. I half-jog along Brougham Street, sticking close to the fences and trees so I will not be seen. I am not sure where to go. Not Fleur’s because that will be the first place they’ll look, and Belinda and Kerry might tell them about Hutchinson Street, so I do not go there.
It is dark and I am cold. All I have on is a thin cotton t-shirt and jeans. But I do not want to ever go back.
I walk around and around then go to St Martins. I sit on the swing in the park and look up at Fleur’s house. No lights are on and I imagine her asleep in her room where there are many posters of Madonna and Duran Duran. Sometimes we dance and sing along to tapes as if we are the pop stars.
I wander the banks of the Heathcote river until it is very late. My legs get tired so I move on to Opawa School and sit under a veranda outside a classroom. To pass the time, I draw graffiti on my jeans. A wall made of tiny bricks and a screaming face.
A cat comes along and sits in my lap. It smells like coal and licks my hand with its sandpaper tongue. The sky is veiled with cloud and I can’t see the moon. I wonder if they are looking for me. I hope that by now they have given up and will leave me to get on with my life.
The next morning, I head for Hutchinson Street, checking for signs that my family isn’t about.
“Cops were here,” says Myra. “You should really call your Mum.”
I hang around the garage with Alastair and Trent. I watch them play fight. Trent gets the better of Alastair and kicks him in the arse.
“What did you do that for?” says Alastair holding his butt.
He is crying and goes to the main house to tell Myra.
“Drop kick,” says Trent.
When it is late, Myra comes out.
“You can’t stay here,” she says to me.
So Trent and I go to the railway yards. We walk along the iron tracks and pass carriages packed with chunks of coal. We find an empty sleeper and go inside. Soon my jeans are off and his are down round his ankles. I am hoping a nightshift worker isn’t around and that we do not tip the carriage on its side. Afterwards, we return to Hutchinson Street.
“You’ll be alright in there.”
Trent points to the old Morris Minor parked outside the house. The car belongs to Trent’s brother but it hasn’t worked in over a year. I lie down on the backseat and listen to my walkman. The only tape I have is WHAM!
The next day there is a raid. There are three police cars up the drive. I hear voices and the open and shut of doors. I stay low, in the back seat of the car. In fifteen minutes they are all gone.
I slip out of the car and go to Sydenham Park. I decide that I should walk around for a bit. So I go all the way to New Brighton. I sit on the sand. It is windy and too cold to swim.
I am hungry and feel dirty and my hair is greasy.
Little kids are playing on the jungle gym and jumping on the concrete whale. I slide down the blue slide then go wash my face in the toilet.
That night Alastair says I can stay at his mate’s place four houses down. There is a blond-haired baby called Harley. His eyes are crusted with conjunctivitis. His mother, Becky, wears a velveteen skirt and has a rose tattoo on her arm. She is going out so she gives Alastair the baby and a small bottle of eye-drops, and throws him a pack of smokes for his troubles.
Alastair’s friend, Dylan, arrives home. He is twenty five and works in a shoe factory and has ginger hair.
It is Friday night so Dylan has bought pizza and beer and some dope. He has a waterbed and the three are us are on it eating and drinking and smoking. There is a tape deck embedded in the headboard and two speakers on the side, but the left one is broken. We listen to Black Sabbath and ACDC and Pa
nterra.
When Alastair goes to the toilet, Dylan kisses me. He has very slight lips and is not a good kisser.
“I think I love you,” he says.
I wish he and his very slight lips would just get away. Then Alastair is at the bedroom door.
“Cops!”
Dylan pushes me off the bed.
“Go!”
The front door is pounding. But I’m off my head and can barely walk. I am on my knees crawling up the hallway and out the back door. In the corner of the yard, there is a small garden shed. I go inside and lie under the work bench and cover myself with sheets of old newspaper.
I try to be quiet. Cobwebs cling to my hair, and the concrete is cold on my back. But I do not move. Footsteps come closer. They halt a few inches from my head. The sound of a cop’s breath, ragged, waiting. His police radio crackles. He sweeps his torch around the room twice, then leaves. Later, Dylan says –
“You can’t come back here again.”
So I go to the yards and bunk down in an empty sleeper. But I remain awake. My smokes are at Dylan’s and I’m dying of thirst and every time I turn, grit presses into my skin. I wonder how Fleur is, whether she has been going to school and is still sneaking out.
I wonder when my family will give up and call off the police. They should know by now that I do not want to go back. I find it hard to think and I forget how long I have been on the lamb. I stare at the ceiling of the carriage until morning light arrives through a rusty corner.
I slip back into Trent’s place. He is not home but Alastair is there.
“What’s wrong with your face?” he says.
I look in the small mirror nailed to the inside of the wardrobe. There is crud in my eyes and my left one is weeping. I wonder if this is what happens when you don’t get enough sleep then remember the baby Harley and his bottle of drops. Alastair goes inside the house and gets me a flannel.
Trent arrives. His eyes slide from me to Alastair.
“What are you two up to?” he snaps.
“Nothing,” says Alastair.
“You’re two were fooling around.”
“We weren’t,” I say.
Then out of the blue, Trent hauls me to my feet and pins my arms to my sides with one strong arm of his. He pushes my head through the noose, tightens it quickly and pulls the rope up.
“Trent!” cries Alastair.
But Trent pulls the rope up and up. I scrape at the noose but it does no good. The fine bones in my windpipe press against my spine. I can feel my face fill with purple and blue. Alastair races to hug my flaying legs. He holds them up and the rope slackens but Trent pulls up and I go up too.
“Let her go!”
Alastair holds on tighter. Trent wrenches the rope taut and I am fading.
Then he lets go and I fall to the floor on top of poor Alastair. There is grey around my vision and I see Alastair standing over me.
“Alright?” he says.
And there is Trent in the background, retreating to sit on his bed, to light a cigarette, to look over at me here on the floor.
*
Myra is good natured but my shenanigans are wearing thin. Police are at her house every other day. She does her best to distract them while I take off over the back fence. Then she tells me things can’t go on like this forever.
One afternoon she calls me to the front door. There is my father, all the way from Hong Kong. He is holding his brown leather manbag and has just freshly showered.
“The moustache looks dumb,” I say.
He blinks at me slowly, taking it in. The manky unwashed hair. The dirty clothes that hang from my shrinking frame. My eyes seeping with conjunctivitis.
“Get in the car,” he says.
Four
MY FATHER usually comes for a week-long visit every second year. He brings us suitcases full of presents from the markets, like clock radios, purses, make-up and dresses. Once he bought us each a pen with a little digital clock on the side. He buys GI Joe action figures and plastic machine guns for my little brother, and a carton of Winfield Blue from duty free for my mother. He stays with Aunt Brenda in Hoon Hay and visits us almost every day.
He takes us out to restaurants like The Coachman or The Clarendon and puts it on his Visa or American Express or Diners Club International. I like the chicken liver pate with warm toast. Sometimes he goes to the fish and chip shop and buys three dozen Bluff oysters and we tuck into them in front of the fire as the rain beats down outside.
He likes to stay until late and have a drink and chat with my mother while my stepfather watches the sports on TV with the sound turned down. My bedroom is next to the lounge and I can hear my father laughing through the wall.
Everyone likes my father. He is funny and generous and smart and important.
*
A policeman interviews me at Sydenham Police station to find out why I ran away. I shrug at his questions and he is getting pissed off.
“Do you want to be a street kid, Rachel?” he says, “because that’s where you’ll end up.”
“Get stuffed,” I say.
I hear my father’s intake of breath.
“Sorry,” he says to the cop.
Then he returns me to my mother’s house, as if it’s all over.
When I get there everyone is angry. My sister can’t look at me and storms off to her boyfriend’s.
“I hope you’re happy, my girl,” says my mother, “with all the trouble you’ve caused.”
My stepfather hovers in the background and keeps the coffee coming.
In the lounge, my little brother is eating a cheese toastie and watching the A-Team.
*
I am planning on leaving again that night. I am not sure where I will go. I wait until they are asleep then try for my window. But it does not budge. I pull and push, then see they have nailed it shut. I try the door but they have locked that too. They think I am an animal in need of control.
The next day my father takes me for a drive to Purau in my Aunt Brenda’s Anglia. It is years since he’s driven in New Zealand and he can’t remember the road rules. He switches lanes without indicating and a man gives him the finger.
The last time we went on a drive was in Fiji, from Nandi to Suva. The rain came down so hard we could not see out the windscreen and had to pull over. We ate spicy pizza in a little restaurant and I saw a gecko crawling up the wall. At night he sat on the balcony with his bottle of vodka and told me about the murder of Harvey and Jeannette Crewe while below us frogs croaked in the wet grass.
After that we flew to San Francisco. We went to Fisherman’s Wharf and played games and won prizes, real prizes, like soft toys and a handheld game, not like at the A&P show, with those silly head-turning clowns where you are lucky to come away with a pencil sharper or drinking straw.
My father buys me a mince pie from the Purau Diary and we sit on a half log on the beach. The tide is out and there are tiny holes in the mud.
“You could’ve been dead,” he says.
It begins to rain.
“And what if I was?”
I drop the pie into the sand and go back to the car.
The next day, my father says –
“We want you to talk to someone.”
“Can I see Trent?”
“Forget him. He’s a halfwit.”
I am in the backseat of my stepfather’s old wide-bodied Falcon, sandwiched between my mother and father. They tell me we are going to a psychiatrist’s office to find out what’s wrong with me.
The office seems very far away. But I don’t mind the drive. Every now and again, my stepfather glances in the rear-view mirror to look at us here in the back.
I am bone tired and my eyes are sore. I am nearly asleep when I see the entrance to the airport and realise I’ve been tricked. I scream at my mother.
“Don’t send me away!”
But they are not listening and my mother holds my arm tight while my father takes a suitcase from the boot. I am twis
ting from my mother’s grip and getting ready to run. Her nails dig into my arm.
“Please,” I say. “I won’t do it again.”
“It’s only a few days in Auckland. So you can rest.”
“Not Hong Kong?”
“No. Just Auckland.”
So I go with my father. When I look back, my stepfather is leading my mother away.
Five
IN AUCKLAND we check into a two bedroom motel unit close to the airport. My father takes my passport and makes me sleep with the bedroom door open. He thinks I am going to run off. But I don’t know Auckland and I will not be running off here.
I go to bed and sleep from 3 o’clock in the afternoon until 1pm the next day. When I wake, my eyes are glued shut with conjunctivitis so I have to bathe them in warm water to open them up. I think about life when I return to Christchurch. I am imagining an independent life without school, running free to do as I please.
We catch the bus into the city and go up to the top of Auckland’s tallest building. We look at the harbour bridge then have McDonalds for lunch.
All the time, I am making plans about when I get back, what I will take when I move into the garage with Trent, how I will leave school and go on the dole. I will no longer have to sit in a classroom and be bored out of my mind or watch The Wolfman disappear for his five minute smoke or have Mr Fogerty look at me as if I am dirt or Mr Hyde purse his lips as if I am dessert.
At night, my father reads a book in the other room. He does not tell me any stories about famous New Zealand murders.
On the third day we go to the airport. I am just about jumping out of my skin with excitement: I will see my friends and be my own boss. My father tells me he must fly back to Hong Kong today, and has to check in his bag at the international desk so we go to the international terminal and walk up the counter.
I do not believe my eyes when he passes over both of our passports and both of our suitcases. I hear myself cry out –
“What are you doing!”
There is a fat Indian man in a baseball cap waiting at the Qantas counter.
A Trick of Light Page 2