Summer Skin

by Kirsty Eagar

  But true to form, Brendan proved to be a dirty fighter. What he did was hand Mitch the letter, saying, ‘Here’s the menu.’

  CHAPTER 13

  GET FREE

  There was nobody waiting at the bus stop, and that was a good thing, because Jess did not want to be near another soul at that moment. Normally, she would have been nervous about waiting somewhere alone at night, but there was a lot of traffic on the double-lane road and the bus shelter was directly beneath a streetlight. She took a seat, watched with interest by a carload of boys pulled up at the lights, Major Lazer blasting from their stereo.

  Her mind worked its way through a rosary of fucks. What the fuck was in that letter? Fuck, Brendan. She should have taken the fucking thing off him in the first place. Fuck, she needed a cigarette. How the fuck was she supposed to have known Julian Lloyd was dead? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

  The lights changed, the car moved on, and the music faded. Too agitated to sit, Jess got up, checking the timetable. Sixteen minutes to go. She left the footpath, collecting twigs, dead leaves and dried grass from beneath the gum trees a little further down the hill, then returned to the bus stop, sitting cross-legged on the concrete at the end of the shelter, carefully arranging the stuff in front of her—dried grass and leaves on the bottom, some of the smaller sticks tee-peed over the top. When she was satisfied, she pulled out her Zippo. The grass flared first, then the leaves caught with resinous zing, the thinner twigs caught next, burning through quickly and leaving a neon-orange line, something skeletal, before disappearing altogether.

  And up until then, Jess had been shaky, but with the fire came something like calm. She slowly fed it the remaining twigs. A car beeped as it passed, but Jess hardly noticed. It was only a small fire, burning on concrete, no wind around. Nothing for anybody to get excited about.

  She heard the slightest noise, a scrape, and she shuddered, knowing instinctively that she was being watched.

  Mitch. She wondered how long he’d been there.

  ‘I didn’t …’ Jess’s voice faltered. She didn’t know what to say to him, and he didn’t look like he wanted to hear it anyway. He handed her Brendan’s letter, neatly folded, then strode off down the hill. Jess watched him go, too shocked to do anything for a moment. Then she got to her feet, stamped out the remainder of her little fire, and ran after him, her messenger bag clonking against her hip.

  When she reached him, he didn’t slow his pace at all, so that she had to dance along sideways because she needed to see his face. ‘Hey, I’m sorry,’ she said, already breathless—from nerves rather than any great exertion to catch up with him. ‘I’m so sorry, okay? I had no idea. And if I had known, I would never have taken that jersey.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ In the gloomy light, the look on Mitch’s face was intimidating.

  ‘Can you just stop for a second? Please.’

  ‘You’ve said what you wanted to say, I heard you, so we’re done, aren’t we?’

  ‘But I don’t want to be done,’ Jess told him, and he made a noise that was part laugh, part bark. ‘I feel so bad. I’d get the jersey back for you, if I could. Actually, I probably could get it back, for a significant sum of money—’

  ‘You want me to pay you to return the jersey that you stole from me?’

  ‘No! I meant I’d pay the money. To the girl who has it. She’s kind of mercenary—heartless, really—and that’s the only way she’d give it back. It doesn’t even matter, though, because the thing is, it’s been defaced. So I’m not sure if you’d want it now anyway. And you’ve got to know that nobody from Unity knew it was his. I took the tag off. And I’d offer to at least return that to you, but I don’t have it anymore either.’

  ‘Where’d it go?’ he asked. ‘Did you sell it to somebody?’

  ‘I burnt it.’

  ‘What are you? Fucking pyro or something?

  ‘Ish. Pyro-ish. I am responsible.’

  ‘Well, he was cremated. Does that get you going?’

  Jess stopped walking abruptly, her hand over her mouth. Mitch turned back. They were near a streetlight, and his face was in shadow, while hers was in the light. He would have seen how shocked she was.

  ‘Okay, I’ll leave you alone now,’ she told him in a small voice, dropping her hand. ‘I know that’s what you want.’

  Mitch didn’t move. She wished she could see his face. She waited, seconds sliding by. It was only as she was turning to go that he finally spoke.

  ‘Why’d you burn the tag?’

  ‘Because you annoyed me so much. That day in the laundry.’

  ‘Yeah? How so?’

  ‘By thinking that … you’re better. Than me.’ Jess’s halting answer was not so much about attacking him as admitting something about herself.

  She heard Mitch draw a heavy breath. When he spoke, his voice was rough but warmer. ‘Seriously, Jersey, there’s no danger of that.’

  There was a run of traffic then; a relief for both of them. Jess watched the bus for the university roll pass, undulating in the way that accordion buses did. She caught a blur of faces, people locked safely away inside their bubble of light. When the road had drained, she was surprised to find Mitch still standing there.

  ‘Was that your bus?’ he asked, and things felt different.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ll wait for the next one. Unless you wanted to walk back together? I won’t talk, I promise.’

  ‘I’m not going back to uni.’

  ‘Oh. Sure. Okay,’ Jess said, nodding. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Well, I was going to Depper Street. This chick I used to fuck lives there now.’

  Jess blinked at him. Then she swatted him with the letter. ‘Why do you do that? You always slap me in the face with the sex stuff, just when I start to think you’re all right.’ Then she went ‘Aarrgh!’ and started walking back up the hill.

  But he was right beside her, his hand closing around the back of her neck, so tightly it made her wince. ‘But now I feel like a swim,’ he said, guiding her through a semi-circle so that she was once again heading downhill. ‘With you.’ Jess glanced sideways at him, her shoulders hunched. ‘Don’t flatter yourself, Jersey. If I wanted that, I’d go to Depper Street. Are you coming or not?’

  ‘Seems like it,’ Jess said on a sigh. They were passing beneath the streetlight again and she did a double-take. His eyes were more electric than ever, maybe because of his missing eyebrows, or the pink hair. ‘You look really beautiful, by the way,’ she told him, not making anything of it, just giving him the truth.

  Mitch dropped his hand like she’d burnt him. ‘How about I stop slapping you in the face with the sex stuff, and you stop calling me beautiful?’

  Jess laughed. ‘Deal.’ They were starting to stride out, and she did a little skip so that her strides matched his—left, right, left. He gave her a sidelong glance. ‘Just a habit,’ she told him.

  ‘How many compulsions do you have, exactly?’

  ‘Enough to keep me busy.’

  ‘I’m Mitch, by the way. Mitch Crawford.’

  She smiled, acknowledging what he was doing. ‘Jess. Jess Gordon.’

  ‘As in Jessica?’

  ‘As in Jess. Just Jess.’

  ‘Do people ever call you Flash? You know, because your surname is Gordon.’

  ‘No, no one in the whole world has ever made that connection. You’re the very first.’

  ‘Sarcasm,’ he scolded. ‘And what are you studying, Just Jess?’

  ‘You already know that, Just Mitchell. You took my timetable.’

  ‘Not tonight, I didn’t. This is a time-out. From that, and everything else.’ He looked sideways at her, his eyes more intense than his tone. ‘All right with you?’

  Jess nodded, thinking it over. ‘I mean, we’re probably never going to speak to each other again, right? So we could just be free.’

  ‘If that does it for you.’

  ‘It does.’ Jess gave him a wan smile. ‘Because, as you’ve probably no
ticed, things are going so well for me at the moment. Where are we headed?’

  ‘That apartment complex before Ryan’s Road.’

  A little way on, they came across an abandoned shopping trolley.

  ‘Seems a shame to waste it,’ Mitch said. ‘You want a ride?’ And Jess smiled and nodded, because now the night felt soft, like things could be fun. He held the trolley still while she clambered into it, her Docs making the metal ring. She faced backwards, so she could look at him. They set off again, Mitch pushing the trolley, or, rather, stopping it from running away down the hill.

  ‘Lucky we’re in a time-out or I’d be nervous,’ Jess told him.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘So what are you studying?’ Jess asked, the rattle of the trolley vibrating her voice. It was good it was so noisy; it relaxed things between them.

  ‘Commerce/law.’

  ‘Huh. Are you doing it because you wanted to? Or because you didn’t want to waste a high entrance score?’

  His manner changed, becoming stiff. ‘Ah … because I didn’t get into medicine.’ Jess laughed. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Just the way you can take something as impressive as getting into comm/law and turn it into a failure.’

  Mitch blinked. ‘Never thought of it like that before. Why are you doing economics?’

  ‘Economics takes you where the money is.’

  ‘That’s a pretty right-wing answer for a girl from Unity.’

  ‘I wouldn’t admit it to anyone there, but you’ll understand. You’re from a rich family.’

  ‘How do you know? We might just be comfortable.’

  ‘You’re at Knights, you went to St Luke’s, and when you were getting those Cokes the other night, you dropped some change. It was nothing, maybe fifteen cents in total, but you fished it out from under the machine. If you were middle class, you would have just left it. So you respect money. Your parents probably drummed it into you.’

  ‘I feel like I’m being dissected.’

  ‘But I’m right, aren’t I? I think about this stuff a lot.’

  He nodded. ‘What about you then? What are your lot like?’

  ‘My family are the type of people who take their pillows with them when they travel.’

  Mitch sucked a breath. ‘Man, you are brutal.’

  ‘No, I’m just giving you the quickest snapshot possible. We don’t actually travel, but if we did, we’d hit Surfers Paradise. Your people, I imagine, prefer Noosa.’ Mitch’s eyes widened, and he gave her a nod. ‘Dad distrusts “The Southeast Corner”—which makes him sound dumb, but he’s not. He didn’t go to uni, did a trade instead, and he gets moody about it, sort of sabotages himself, I think. But he’s smart by any other definition, reads a lot, asks people questions. Mum works at Kmart. And, for the record, they’d laugh their heads off if they heard what I just said about the pillows. We dissect ourselves all the time. It’s family policy. Dissect yourself, dissect everybody else, don’t let people push you around, and always bear in mind that hotel pillows, even the expensive ones, are full of dust mites and other people’s grease. My family are probably your family’s worst nightmare. Self-educated rednecks. Bogans with books. Other people worry about climate change; we worry that Ford will stop making V8s. I’ll know I’ve arrived when I buy a jet ski.’

  ‘And you’re the eldest.’ Mitch looked like he might be starting to enjoy himself.

  ‘Dissecting me now? Twin brothers. Twelve-year-olds. How’d you know?’

  ‘I can’t puncture it by explaining my method.’

  ‘In other words, you guessed.’

  He ignored that. ‘Always been treated like you were something special?’

  ‘Very good. The downside is I’m expected to live up to it.’

  ‘That’s not so bad if you’re the great shining hope. I’m worried I’ll let the side down.’

  ‘Poor baby. So, how many brothers do you have?’

  ‘Hah! Just one. But let’s stay with you.’ Mitch studied her. ‘I wouldn’t have picked that as being your background.’

  ‘Really?’ Jess said, and the word had the faintest tint to it. Hopefulness, or pleasure, or something else that made her flush.

  ‘Morphing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I take notice of things. I read a lot, and I’m intelligent—’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Not boasting,’ Jess said. ‘It’s a fact. Six-point-five grade point average, thank you very much. Half a point off perfect.’

  ‘Six point seven-five here.’

  ‘Ooh-la-la.’

  Mitch grinned, and then said, ‘There’s another reason.’

  Jess brightened, finding her own dissection weirdly enjoyable. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I’ve been in your room, remember? Docs, two pairs of Ray-Bans, one hell of an Adidas addiction—’

  ‘It’s the only true brand. Iconic.’

  ‘Yeah, but that stuff’s not cheap.’

  Jess frowned. ‘I never said we were poor. Hello! Heard of the mining boom? I believe it visited Bundaberg. Dad’s been working fly in fly out for the last eight years. But perhaps you’re insinuating that I have taste, and, in that case, I’ve got a fairy godmother. Dad’s the black sheep of a family that probably isn’t too different from yours. We don’t talk to his parents, but Aunt Heather’s always kept in touch. Did town planning, married an architect, nice big Queenslander home. Wears linen shirts because she’s got a cleaning lady who irons them for her. She’s a Brisbane sophisticate, gets obsessed with things like salmon confit. They don’t have kids, so I’m her project. She wanted to help with my college fees, but Dad wouldn’t let her, so every year she gives me three grand for textbooks behind his back.’ Jess smiled. ‘Between that and work, I’m kind of rolling in it. Nouveau riche.’

  ‘I spend less than five hundred on textbooks, and I’m doing a double degree,’ Mitch said, sounding disapproving.

  ‘Don’t be literal.’

  ‘So, what? You just spend it on stuff?’ Mitch sounded even more disapproving.

  ‘No, I put most of it into bank shares. And I bought a little Telstra.’

  ‘Smart. Good dividends.’

  ‘You know about dividends?’ Jess shook her head. ‘I told you. Rich.’

  Mitch’s gaze slid to the side, his mouth open, as though he’d never realised that this was unusual. ‘But you know about dividends.’

  ‘That’s because I intend to be rich. Slightly different thing.’

  ‘It must be. Because the money I’ve got invested is money I earned.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Jess said, mock seriously. ‘At the sugar mill.’ Then she giggled.

  ‘What’s so funny about that?’

  ‘I keep seeing you hot and sweaty in overalls and a hard hat. Calendar stuff.’

  ‘I was in the office.’

  ‘Nooo,’ Jess wailed. ‘Disappointed.’

  ‘Not so sexy now,’ he told her.

  They were on Sir Fred Schonell Drive by this stage, which wasn’t as well lit, and Jess was glad—she’d had a sudden recollection of him sucking her nipples.

  ‘So you do economics, and you go where the money is, and then what?’ Mitch asked. ‘You be who?’

  ‘Just someone,’ Jess said vaguely. She sniffed, giving him a decisive nod. ‘All I know is I want to travel a lot.’

  ‘And you’ll take your pillow.’

  ‘Proudly,’ said Jess, and they grinned at each other. ‘You know what?’ she mused. ‘You’re fun.’ Mitch snorted, dismissively. ‘Oh, yes. I think this is who you really are. Not the other guy.’

  ‘What other guy?’

  ‘The one from the laundry. But don’t worry, I won’t blow your alpha cover. So, who’s the dude in the suit?’

  ‘You’re so smart, you tell me.’

  Jess considered it, wrinkling her nose. ‘I’m thinking secret service. Or your mother.’

  ‘Close.’

  ‘That’s your brother? He’s nothing like you at
all. He’s so …’

  ‘Uptight?’

  ‘Hot,’ Jess said, and Mitch rewarded her with a laugh. He sounded puffed, and she realised it was because they were going up a steep hill. ‘Hey, do you want me to get out?’

  ‘Nah, you’re right. Just keep talking. About anything you want.’

  Jess smiled, because the way he said it made her feel good. Then her smile faded. ‘I’ve run out.’

  ‘Didn’t think that could happen. Can I ask you something then? How in the world of fuck did you end up with the head case?’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘You said, don’t let anybody push you around.’

  ‘No, my dad said that,’ Jess corrected. ‘And if he’s in one of his moods, we all get out of his way.’

  ‘Waiting.’

  Jess sighed, loudly and with a distinct lack of grace. ‘His name is Brendan, and he wasn’t always like that. Well, maybe he was, but in the beginning I thought all the drama was passion or something.’ She frowned, hit by a sudden realisation. ‘I was going to say it was because I cared about him—only because, for you, it might be a revolutionary idea. But the truth is, it’s because he wanted me so bad. There is something totally addictive about being the focus of another person’s attention. My downfall was sleeping with him. Sex tricks you into caring about the other person, even if they are a possessive head case.’

  ‘Depends on the sex.’

  Something in Mitch’s tone jagged Jess’s attention. ‘Oh, my God, you read the letter, didn’t you?’ Even his smile looked guilty. ‘Bastard!’

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s covered by the time-out. It doesn’t go any further than me. And I did respect your privacy to a degree. I skipped the soppy stuff, and the parts where he seemed to be pressing charges. I only read the dirty bits.’

  ‘Why? So you could call me a slut again?’ Jess asked, her voice heated.

  ‘Oh, come on, you didn’t take that seriously, did you?’ Mitch stopped the trolley.

  Jess wouldn’t look at him, staring at the houses on the other side of the road. ‘Of course I did. Given you don’t actually know my sexual history—forgetting for a second that it’s irrelevant—I can only assume you said it because for a minute there I enjoyed myself. I hate that way of thinking.’