The dragging, sawing sensation was awful. My scalp burned.
Arden hacked through the hair just below her hand and let go.
A raggedy, concave bob swung around my face, just past my chin. The feeling of lightness was nice. Just an even-up and I could have lived with it. I didn’t know why I hadn’t done it sooner, except that Vivienne had kept hers long and I’d just never even thought about doing something different.
‘Hey, thanks. It feels good,’ I said, touching the blunt ends. ‘Maybe just go around the edges again…’
Arden lifted a piece and cut again, this time only a couple of centimetres from my scalp.
I turned around and said, ‘I like it. You can stop cutting.’
She twisted my shoulders to the front and said, ‘You still look like you.’
I made a swollen lump on my lip with my teeth. Apart from violence, there was no exit. I made my mind empty, filled it back up with the resignation that I could summon whenever I remembered that the worst had already happened. Nothing else would ever hurt as much again.
It was only hair.
Darcy left and came back with the round hand-mirror that sat over the bathroom basin. She held it in front of me so I could watch.
Arden continued cutting.
When she had finished, there were uneven tufts and zigzag edges, but my new haircut was short and wispy. Without all that weight, it stood straight up; without all that hair, my eyes were enormous.
Darcy angled the mirror so I could see the back.
The nape of my neck was cold, bare, and so white. Childlike.
I ran my hands over the skin and brushed away the amputated ends. I could see Darcy’s reflection behind me but I couldn’t read her expression.
‘I think she looks pretty,’ AiAi said through a mouthful of bread.
‘I think she looks like one of Carrie’s dyke friends,’ said Darcy.
Carrie yelled, ‘For fuck’s sake, go find your happy place, Darce.’ She slammed her cup into the sink and stomped up the stairs.
Arden’s mouth was thin as a paper cut. ‘Clean up this mess,’ she spat.
I scooped up handfuls of hair. It was already drying, dying, no longer a part of me.
Maybe I wasn’t supposed to look pretty. Maybe none of us were.
I swept up the rest of the hair, stuffed it into a plastic shopping bag and took it outside.
Bree was smoking, leaning up against the wall of the house. She had her iPod headphones in, her eyes closed. Her mouth moved silently to music I couldn’t hear.
I touched her arm.
She jumped and plucked out her headphones. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You look different.’
‘Not like me,’ I said.
‘No. You still look like you. Just lighter.’ She smiled. Her dimples were deep, like someone had pressed their thumbs into her face. A quick flash and they were gone. ‘I’ve gotta go somewhere. Come if you want.’
I got the feeling she’d been waiting for me. I leaned the bag up against the side of the house and left it there.
‘Did Arden cut your hair, too?’ I asked her. ‘And the others?’
‘No.’ She tucked her iPod into the waistband of her jeans. Her mouth twisted. ‘The boys already had short hair.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘Two hundred bucks a week is a lot,’ I said.
Bree led the way through a maze of alleys between double-storey townhouses. She walked quickly and smoked. Four cigarettes already and we’d only been walking for fifteen minutes. The air was razor-sharp and stung my throat like a strong mint.
‘Yeah, it is. But it’s actually not that hard. Joe helps out at the markets. He sorts through fruit and vegetables and gets rid of all the rotten stuff. Sweeps the floor. The greengrocers just sling him some cash here and there. It all adds up.’
‘What about benefits?’
‘We’re not supposed to get money from the government, otherwise it’s too easy to track us down. We don’t exist, remember? It’s better that way.’
‘Better for who?’ I asked but she didn’t answer. ‘So what do you do?’
Bree looked uncomfortable. ‘You’re limping,’ she said, changing the subject. She stared down at my feet.
‘I don’t like wearing shoes. These are too tight. Come on, it can’t be that bad. I know what Silence does.’
She laughed. ‘You’ve seen him in action? Quick little bugger, isn’t he? He’s nearly been caught a few times. I reckon his ear’s half hanging off by now.’
I nodded. ‘What about Darcy?’
‘Darce? Umm. Guys like her.’ She said it in a rush, as if the admission had a bad taste. ‘If you know what I mean.’
I knew what she meant. The thought of it made me feel empty.
‘Don’t feel bad,’ Bree said. ‘She brags that she only has to work one day a week. She’s a cold one. Crappy childhood and all that.’
‘So what about the others?’
‘Arden looks out for the rest of us. Makes sure we brush our teeth.’ Again, that flashing smile.
‘Like Wendy Darling.’
Bree shook her head.
‘Peter Pan. The Lost Boys.’
Still blank.
‘Never mind.’
‘Malik deals,’ she went on. ‘He works the clubs. That’s why he’s always asleep in the daytime. And AiAi is pretty good at selling stuff to tourists.’
‘Stuff? Like what?’
‘Once he got forty bucks for a potato that looked like Mary McKillop.’
We laughed. Blunt ends of hair were making my neck itch. I brushed my hand through what was left and a few stray, long pieces caught in my fingers. I yanked them out.
‘It’s not so bad,’ Bree said. ‘You have a good-shaped head.’ She offered me a cigarette.
‘No, thanks. Where are we going?’
She shrugged and headed off down the path by the river.
I kept my distance and stuck to the far side of the path. The river was brown and sluggish and it reminded me of Willy Wonka’s chocolate river. A few tourists pedalled madly in paddleboats, shrieking, skirting the spray from a fountain.
‘I had some money, but it’s gone,’ I confessed because the worry wouldn’t leave me.
‘Gone? Gone how?’
‘I’m not sure. It was in my backpack last night and this morning it wasn’t there.’ I tried to keep accusation from my tone.
‘Someone nicked it, you mean?’ She frowned. ‘Darcy, you think? Wouldn’t surprise me.’
‘I’d hate to be wrong.’
‘Yeah. But you probably wouldn’t be. How much are we talking?’
She flicked her butt into the water. It landed at the river’s edge, suspended in phosphorescent ripples of scum. A duck sailed in to check it out, followed by the rest of the fleet.
‘A few hundred.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah. Shit.’ I spat the word out.
‘Don’t make a big deal about it to Arden,’ she said. ‘She looks after us. But if you’re new, like you are, she makes you earn it. Your place here. Do you get what I’m saying? You have to prove you won’t screw anyone over.’
‘She was going to make me leave this morning.’
‘I know, she blows hot and cold. But we’re all she has.’
‘Where’s her family?’ I asked.
‘She ran off when she was fifteen. She’s been on the street for two years. Reckons she’s never going back. Anyway, I shouldn’t be talking about her business.’
I guess I was trying to understand why anyone would choose to live on the street when they had a home and a family somewhere.
‘We’re the same age,’ I said. ‘She seems older.’ I thought of Arden’s hand and my skin prickled. ‘That squat is pretty bad,’ I blurted to change the subject. ‘And I’ve…’
‘Why are you here?’ Bree interrupted. ‘Don’t you have a nice white family who treats you good? ’Cause, to me, you look like you’re just trying on a bit of rough. Like you
’re having some big adventure. What the fuck do you know about us?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I meant it.
‘Cooee you in your too-tight shoes,’ she said, but not unkindly. ‘The squat’s a palace. It’s better than nothing. Better than getting pissed on while you’re sleeping in a doorway.’
She was right. I just didn’t understand it. Vivienne and I clashed often, and I didn’t always get why she felt the need for perpetual motion, but I would never have left her. Not while she was living. Surely the family you had was better than no family at all.
Bree stopped by a man reclining on a concrete slope beneath a bridge. He appeared to be asleep, or dead. She leaned over and touched him gently on the leg.
This was the image I saw when I thought about homeless people. Pods of them, basking, lazy seals on a beach. Daytime sleepers wrapped in newspaper like giant parcels of fish and chips. Hands gripping brown paper bags, their belongings stuffed in shopping trolleys. Or no belongings at all.
‘Hey, Tom,’ she said to him. ‘Seen the others?’
The man sat up, blinking. He held out his hand and she passed him a cigarette.
‘Nup. Park, probably. Giss a few extra, Bree.’
She gave him a couple more. ‘Which park?’
‘The big ’un in the middle.’
She thanked him and kept walking, long strides, with me trotting after her.
‘So where do you come from? In the country, I mean?’ Bree asked.
‘You know—all over. Small towns. We moved around a lot, me and my mum.’ I stopped. I pretended to tie my bootlace because my eyes were stinging.
When I looked up, she was waiting.
‘No, I don’t know. I’ve only ever lived here.’ She spread her arms, held out her hands like cups. Behind her, the blueish silhouette of buildings shrouded in smog, made miniature by distance and held in her palms. ‘What was it like?’
I remembered every one of those towns.
I told her about the best and the worst. The slow and sleepy places where weekdays rolled past like weekends and Mondays didn’t matter. Battered shacks perched on cliffs overlooking the endless, rumpled sea. Afternoons spent waiting on the docks, swinging my legs off a pier until boats rolled in with crates full of oysters and crayfish still gasping. Pulling fishhooks out of my feet because I never wore shoes, playing with other kids whose names I never knew. Those were the unforgettable summers. There were outback towns where you couldn’t see the roads for red dust, grids of streets with wandering dogs and children who ran wild and swam naked in creeks. I remembered climbing ancient trees that had a heartbeat if you pressed your ear to them. Boomboom-boomboom. Dreamy nights sleeping by the campfire and waking up covered in fine ash, as if I’d slept through a nuclear holocaust. We were wanderers, always with our faces to the sun.
And there were towns where Vivienne and I learned fast about survival on the fly, where travellers and workers would flit in and flit out, leaving their money at the bar. It was possible to reinvent yourself in every new place and leave your sins behind. And in every town Vivienne left a sin behind—usually a man who wasn’t hers, often unpaid rent. Once we had all our money stolen from our motel room and another time we were turfed out of a truck in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night. We walked the highway in pitch darkness until another truckie picked us up and set us down somewhere new. If I could have plotted our route on a map it would have looked like a child’s mad scribble on a wall.
Bree listened, a faraway expression on her face. ‘I’ve never even climbed a tree,’ she said.
‘We moved around a lot,’ I said again. ‘We were free.’ I sat on a bench and unlaced my boots. Recollection hurt so much; I could barely remember my unbroken self.
‘What are you doing?’
‘We’re going to climb a tree,’ I answered.
‘I don’t do heights,’ she said.
‘It’s easy.’ My feet were white and pinched. I rubbed them and flexed my toes like a dancer.
I chose a drooping willow that arced across the river. Its bark was serrated and tore at the soles of my feet, but Bree was watching, so I scooted up, up, until the branches levelled out. I saw abandoned birds’ nests hidden in the canopy, a deflated balloon on a string, trapped, carved initials and declarations of love etched in the bark. There was no view up there, only a sea of hazy green. And the churning river below.
I faltered. My foot slipped.
I felt it then, the fear of that unpredictable river. Like a dog you’ve known all your life that suddenly bares its teeth and you see that it was always wild, never tame; how easily it could turn.
I froze. That had never happened to me before.
I didn’t want to be dangling over that water. I knew then that Vivienne’s legacies weren’t all good, that this one was starting to eat away at me from the inside.
‘Come down. You’re freaking me out,’ Bree called. ‘You’ll fall and land on your head.’
I’ve never fallen, I thought. ‘Come up,’ I called back, but my voice was small.
‘I’m going,’ she said. And went.
I edged down slowly. When I dropped onto the footpath she was out of sight. I felt awkward, as if I’d been caught dancing by myself.
I shouldn’t have showed off. What bloody use was it there, in the city, to be able to climb a tree? I ran my hand over my bare neck and I felt like crying again.
A few weeks before she died, Vivienne woke me with her stare. I felt its burn as I dozed in the chair next to her bed. That sudden scrutiny, her stuttering breath, it made me realise that this was it. She was going. And instead of holding her outstretched hand and taking her as far as I could, I backed away.
She felt it. And she didn’t blame me, not really.
Beautiful girl, her eyes told me, though they were sunken and yellow.
She had become a shadow that slept all the time. The morphine was a steady drip and it kept her from talking. When she did she made no sense. I can’t remember the last thing she said to me. Or the last thing I said to her.
I put my boots back on and thought about trying to find Silence. My stomach whined and I realised I hadn’t eaten since the night before. A man walked past with a chocolate doughnut and a steaming coffee. He took three quick bites and tossed the last of the doughnut, minus icing, to the ducks. I nearly dived for it but it rolled into the river and the ducks got there first.
I walked. I didn’t know where I was going—but I was used to that. I found a few green, unripe apples that hung over a fence and stuffed them into my pockets. I ate one slowly, pulling a face as the sour juice ran down my chin.
I knew I was getting to the heart of the city as traffic slowed and grew congested. There was a rhythmic beat to the footsteps, the tooting horns, the clanging trams. It seemed like everyone was travelling in one direction and I was moving in the other, in slow motion, like a badly shot music video, mouthing words to a song I didn’t know.
I ended up near the entrance to the train station where Silence had found me. There was a portable newsagent stand and dozens of copies of my face in black and white. I was front-page news, except I didn’t look like that anymore.
I stopped and stared.
The old guy shoved a newspaper at me and held out his hand for change. He didn’t look twice at my face, or the picture.
I shook my head and he lost interest. That was how easily you could disappear.
I wandered for hours.
After a few laps of what seemed to be the hub of the city, I started to find my bearings. I followed a gaggle of people from a tour bus into a skyscraper with a viewing deck on the forty-third floor. Up there, I could see the river snaking its way through a stripe of vegetation that connected a series of parks. I worked out the direction Bree and I had come from that morning. Below, people looked like a line of ants ferrying food back to the nest.
With a dozen or more lenses zooming past my nose, I spotted that strangely vacant square of green where I
had sat with Silence on my first day in the city. It was a world inside a snow dome, but without the snow.
I was drawn to it. That was where I’d go.
When I reached the park, I headed straight for the statue. I felt the ridges of the horse’s hooves and the strain of its tendons. Its rider was standing in the saddle, a sword raised above his head in triumph. Over what, I didn’t know. The base was covered with gobs of old gum, cracks stuffed with rubbish, bricks defaced with tags and graffiti.
‘How’d you find me?’ Bree said.
She was watching me from the other side of the statue.
‘I didn’t. You found me,’ I said.
‘Whatever,’ she said.
‘Are you alone?’ I asked.
‘Course not.’ Bree gestured to a group of Aboriginal men and women sitting in a circle on the grass. They were darker-skinned than Bree, dressed in traditional costume, their faces and arms painted with streaks of grey. ‘They’re doing a performance for the festival.’
‘Can I watch?’ I walked closer to the group and Bree followed, reluctantly. ‘What do you do?’
She shook her head. ‘I help out but I don’t…you know. I just don’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s not my thing,’ she said and kicked the ground.
‘Oh.’
One of the men pulled a didgeridoo onto his lap. He ran his hands over it, like he was checking for breaks, then lifted the end to his lips. His cheeks ballooned and a long, deep sound vibrated.
It was just a test note, but I shivered.
‘I love that sound,’ I said. ‘It goes through my bones and leaves through my feet.’
Bree laughed. ‘You’re weird, you know that?’
I blushed.
‘That’s my mum, over there. My uncle plays the didge.’ She said it fiercely.
She had a family. A close one, judging by the easy banter I heard.
‘So why do you sleep at the squat?’
She sighed. ‘I’d have to share a bedroom with two younger brothers. It’s shit.’
‘But you share a room with me and Carrie.’
‘That’s different.’
‘You’re lucky,’ I told her. ‘To have your mum, I mean.’
‘What happened to yours?’
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