The Dark Part of Me

by Belinda Burns

  the dark part of me

  Belinda Burns was born in Brisbane in 1974. She studied English Literature at the University of Queensland and a Masters in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University College. She lives in Australia after seven years in London.

  For my mother

  First published in Great Britain in trade paperback in 2006

  by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

  This ebook edition published by Atlantic Books in 2012.

  Copyright © Belinda Burns 2006

  The moral right of Belinda Burns to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  9780857895349

  Atlantic Books

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  ‘A man beholds the beauty of the world, is reminded of truth and beauty, and his wings begin to grow.’

  Plato, Phaedrus 249e

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  1

  Too bloody hot for cappuccinos. Thirteen days till Christmas and still no sign of rain. A state of disaster outback and it was pretty dry in BrisVegas, too. Grass crunchy brown underfoot. Bushfire warnings on the news. No sprinklers allowed. The river was low and swampy, dead cat-fish bobbing on the surface. Cicadas droning on and on. Blowflies buzzing in my ears. Everything was withering away.

  Too bloody hot for cappuccinos. That’s what the real-estate men from across the road said when they came in to the café to watch the Test in the air-con. Bearded men sucking on iced-chocolates, strawberry milkshakes, eyes slapped on the box. Extra ice-cream, would ya, girly? A wink, a wet lip lick. Later, after knocking off, it was beers they always wanted. Extra cold, would ya, girly? Wink. Lick.

  Trish was in the basement carpark, smoking a joint. I was at the counter, peeling paper doilies and zoning out on the cricket. There was something about the soothing ‘chock’ of the bat hitting the ball, the soft clapping and the lullaby voice of Richie Benaud that sent me off into a doily trance. Pick and peel. Pick and peel. My nails are painted blue today. Pick and peel. Old Richie took me back to those hot Sunday afternoons when I was just a kid and Dad sat on the back patio drinking beer and listening to the match…

  Mum was in her bedroom, napping in flesh-coloured bra and knickers. I was made to nap too, although not once did I close my eyes. It was boring lying next to Mum in my undies, my chest bare and sticky, staring up at the ceiling fan, which spun so fast I couldn’t see the blades. From outside, I could hear the chink of stubbie against stubbie, the rise and fall of excited voices on Dad’s pocket radio. He would’ve watched it on the telly except Mum wouldn’t let him smoke his rollies in the house.

  I wriggled off the bed.

  ‘Don’t disturb your father,’ Mum murmured, rolling over, her stretchy boobs mashed between her arms. ‘Not when he’s listening to the cricket.’ From the side of the bed, I watched Mum fall asleep, breathing through her mouth, lips slightly parted, before I turned and padded out of the room.

  Dad was pitched forwards alert as a fox on his yellow folding chair, staring across the swimming pool, waiting for the willow crack. His elbows rested on his knees, a squat, brown stubbie bottle clenched in his hands. I reached for the catch on the sliding door but even on tippy-toes I wasn’t tall enough. Squashing my nose up to the glass to make a pig’s snout, I pummelled my fists against the pane to get his attention. He swivelled in his chair and stared at me blankly as if he had never seen me before in his life.

  ‘Let me out!’ I yelled, my hot breath misting up the glass, grinning, thinking this was some new kind of game. But he took another swig of beer and turned away.

  I sat cross-legged at the door and waited. It seemed like ages I was there. When my bottom got sore I lay down on my stomach, my chest pressed against the cool, white tiles. I folded my arms and rested my head on them like a pillow. Staring sideways out of the glass, I watched the backs of Dad’s Volleys as his feet swung back and forth, back and forth. When he struggled to his feet I shot up, thinking he’d decided to let me out, but he just wandered over to the fence for a wee, then headed back across the lawn. He took another stubbie out of the esky and plonked down in his chair. Later, Mum came out from her nap, pillow creases on her face.

  ‘C’mon, Rosemary,’ she said. ‘He’s not interested.’

  I was wondering what’d made Dad such a bastard, when a cheer went up from the beardies. Ponting had hit a six.

  Trish ran in from the back with a joint between her lips. ‘Earth to Rosebud. Come in, Rosebud.’ I hadn’t heard the phone ringing. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, grabbing the receiver. ‘It’ll be the Coke man.’ I looked out at the tables still littered with dirty lunch plates and thought about going to clear them, but a second later, she waved me over. I asked her who it was but she just winked and handed me the phone. From the grin on her face I had an inkling.

  ‘Rosie?’ It was him alright, but with a slight accent.

  Blood throbbed in my ears. My armpits sweated. Trish pinched my butt. She knew the score. She’d had my romantic history in truckloads.

  ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’ I said, pretending I didn’t have a clue while inside I was rioting.

  He laughed down the line, confident, cocky. ‘You remember.’ Like fuck, no. Like fuck I’d wiped him clean out of my head. ‘Thought you’d have quit that shithole by now,’ he was saying. ‘Aren’t you nearly finished uni?’ He didn’t know about me dropping out. I hadn’t told him about dropping out.

  ‘Where are you?’ My voice came out gruff and low, like a man’s.

  ‘Back home. Mum and Dad’s.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘’Bout a fortnight.’ He paused. ‘I’m having a welcome home barbie tonight at the oldies’. Thought you might like to come.’

  Cold spiders skittered up my spine. He’d been back two weeks and he was only calling me now? Trish was poking me in the ribs.

  ‘Say something, Rosebud,’ she whispered, but I couldn’t.

  ‘You around?’ he prompted.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe. It’s hard to say.’

  ‘Cool, babe. See you around eight.’ He’d assumed, arrogantly but rightly, that wild fucking goannas couldn’t have stopped me.

  ‘Hang on—’

  But he was already gone and that was it – the precise moment I’d been waiting almost two years for, since I was seventeen. I slumped into one of the booths, a quivering lump of jangles. He’d called me babe. I was still his babe.

  ‘That was Scott,’ I said, my hand trembling.

  ‘No kidding.’ Trish lit a fag and inhaled hard. She was five years older than me
and already had little crow’s-feet around her eyes. With her short, spiky hair and the silver bar through her eyebrow she looked like a dyke, but guys still went for her. Trish thought I was insane to wait all that time for Scott. She said I’d regret it when I was old and wrinkly. But then Trish had one-night stands and snorted coke and thought true love was bullshit.

  ‘When’d he get back?’ Trish ashed into an empty latte glass.

  ‘Yesterday,’ I lied.

  ‘How long’s it been?’

  I shrugged. He’d been gone nearly two years and it was a year since he dumped me over the phone. At the time, I’d kind of lost the plot. Mum called it my ‘breakdown’ but it wasn’t like that. I was just a bit hacked off with life. Trish helped me through the bad times, though, kind of like a bigger, tougher sister. She got me into new shit like chatting up dense rugby-fuckers for kicks and dancing to trance and drinking sneaky scotch and smoking pot in our breaks at work. She took me to get a butt-tattoo in Elizabeth Arcade and told me about all the different kinds of sex she’d had, like anal and asphyxiation and dressing up, how she loved being spanked on the arse and pashing girls when she was on E.

  Apart from hanging out with Trish, I hated working at Temptations. But I’d stuck it out, ferreting away every last bean, thinking I’d surprise Scott by showing up in London. I’d already saved ten grand, helped along by Trish’s nifty knack for till-skimming. She was biding her time, too, planning her escape. It wouldn’t be long now, we both kept saying, before we bailed, except now Scott was back I didn’t need to go to London after all.

  I looked Trish in the eye. ‘What the fuck are we doing in this shithole, hey?’

  ‘Not for much longer, babe.’

  We went out the back and sat on the steps by the industrial bins. Trish rolled while I stared across the Woolies carpark, water mirages shimmering above the rows of cars, metallic bodies roasting in the midday sun-blast. Beyond, the city floated, murky and hazy. It was a poor excuse for a skyline, just a few scrapers stuck in the middle of a petering ramble of mid-size office buildings, smudging into vast purplish plains of burbia. It depressed me; the heat, the weed, my place in it all. There was no room to be different, no room for any freaks of any kind. It was all about conforming and having a flash car and a big, brick house and kids and pets and a massive widescreen.

  ‘So, what’d he want?’ Trish passed the joint.

  I took a deep drag. ‘He’s invited me to some crap party.’

  Trish scowled and took back the smoke. ‘Reckon he’s keen for a root. Calls up his old girlfriend who’s still mental as shit for him.’ She assumed that all Aussie blokes were the same, rooting around, drinking beer, watching porno. ‘So you gunna do him?’ she asked.

  ‘Might.’

  ‘If I know you, Rosebud, I’d put good money on you banging him tonight.’

  I grinned because of course I wanted to bang Scott asap. I imagined the look on his face when he opened the door and saw me standing there. For a few seconds, he doesn’t recognize me because I look different to when he last saw me. Instead of tiny tees and denim minis, I wear long flowy skirts and muslin tops, a serpent armband and beaten silver rings from the Valley market, purple glitter on my eyelids and a butterfly sticker on my left cheekbone. I’ve grown my hair long and wear it braided in Heidi plaits with a fresh pink hibiscus from the backyard stuck in each end. I’ve had my belly-button pierced with a ruby stud and I am skinnier, too, much skinnier than before. But then, he twigs and wraps his arms around me, pashing me wild with tongue. We go inside to his bedroom, where he undresses me and pushes me down on the bed. He tears off his shirt and his body is pale from the lack of sun in London and a little thinner without his mum’s fry-ups. We root for ages.

  Trish would have died if she knew I’d only ever fucked Scott. She thought I was like her, rooting for kicks whenever I got the urge. When Scott and I broke up, it was Trish who tried to convince me that the only way to get over him was to screw heaps of other guys. Like the time I went home with this arty-looking guy called Jed I met at Ric’s Bar in the Valley. All night I’d been checking him out, real sly-like. He was bean-thin with longish black hair and smudgy eyes. I liked his bright yellow bowling shoes, and the way he leant against the bar, drinking red wine, blowing smoke rings, taking in the scene. He looked the complete opposite of Scott. When I pointed him out to Trish she cock-sucked her finger and dared me to pash him. So, I did. I sidled over and grabbed him round the chops. His breath was foul, like he’d never owned a toothbrush, but when he said, ‘Let’s go screw,’ I went with him, winking Trish goodbye, telling myself, this is good, this is good for me.

  We walked fast along Brunswick, past Super Deluxe and the Press Club, not holding hands. A bit further on and we turned down Harcourt, past the hookers strutting back and forth outside the 24-hour Laundromat – some trannies, some straight, all in heels, sickly-skinned under the fluoro. Jed’s bedsit was a few doors down, along an alley on the ground floor. We went in and he switched on the light. A naked bulb illuminated: one brown-vinyl armchair, a banged-up telly, various half-eaten containers of take-away food (blowflies hovering above) and, underneath the window, a single blue-striped mattress. What the fuck was I thinking?

  ‘You at uni?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, snapping off the light, ‘I’m a poet.’

  He took me by the hand and led me towards the bare mattress.

  ‘Let’s fuck,’ he said, a poet of few words, and started tugging off my clothes. He fumbled with the hooks on my bra but I flinched at the touch of his fingers.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t.’ The problem was he wasn’t Scott.

  ‘But you smell so good.’ He kept on like a rodent, snorting and sniffing around me, his arms pale, weedy sticks. ‘You said you wanted to screw.’ Next thing, he was naked, skinny as a monkey, clambering all over me, sucking hard on my neck. It was dark but I could see his penis as he squirmed back and forth across a thin blade of streetlight. It was small and mottled, crinkly-crumply uncircumcised, like an old man’s, not like Scott’s thick, rounded tip, buffed and shiny-smooth.

  ‘Stop! Just stop! Get off me!’

  I ran away. I couldn’t do it. Scott was in my blood and I couldn’t get him out. I wasn’t like Trish. I lacked the ‘casual rooting’ gene.

  A bellow came from inside the shop. ‘Trisha!’

  ‘Fuck. Slob’s here,’ Trish said.

  ‘Shit.’ I jumped up, stubbing out the joint and lobbing the scotch glass into the skip.

  Slob (real name Bob) was Trish’s uncle. Hairy, foul-mouthed and always reeking of Kouros, he’d made a packet out of his poxy coffee shop franchises which’d sprouted like killer weeds all over the western suburbs. ‘We Greeks,’ he’d say, puffing on a fat cigar, ‘are as good at making money as we are at making sex.’

  ‘Trisha!’ Slob roared, again. ‘Get your arse out here!’

  ‘Just stick your tits out,’ said Trish. ‘He loves your tits.’

  We sauntered inside; Trish in front, me behind.

  Red-faced and cursing, Slob was blustering around making milkshakes for a fresh pack of beardies queued at the counter. He went berko at Trish but except for a pervo squiz at my boobs, said nothing to me.

  2

  Mum blamed Scott for me dropping out of uni. She reckoned that if I hadn’t met him, I’d still be studying law, not wasting my life at Temptations. He was a man, she used to say, and deep down all men were rotten. I’d argue that they weren’t all drunk losers like Dad but she wouldn’t have it. When Scott went overseas, she said he’d pulled a fast one. When he broke up with me over the phone, she said I told you so. She was right, but at the time I swore she was just bitter.

  The night I first met Scott, I was sixteen. Mum had shouted me to Valentine’s all-you-can-eat food buffet for finishing my final school exams. We hardly ever went out for dinner – Chinese take-away was our usual Friday night treat – but Mum had a two-for-one vouche
r which she wanted to use. We’d driven past Valentine’s a million times on the expressway (there was this huge, pink, inflatable heart strung up outside to attract passing traffic) but never been in. It was hardly my idea of a fun night out but Mum thought she was onto a winner. We went early to avoid the crowds but the joint was still packed. Compared with the rest of them in Bonds singlets and stubbie shorts, we were totally overdressed, especially Mum, who was decked out in one of her eighties pastel suits plus heels. I hated the place and the way everyone gawped at us as we walked to our table. Worse though, as soon as we sat down with our first round from the buffet, Mum went off on one of her rants.

  ‘You can be anything you want,’ she said, working a Wet-One into a lather, ‘so long as you don’t stuff it up.’ She waved the packet at me. ‘Go on. Give your hands a little wipe.’

  ‘No.’ I was fed up with her treating me like a five-year-old.

  ‘Please. Do it for me.’ She shook a Wet-One in my face. ‘You’ll be using your fingers.’ She nodded at my plate of calamari rings.

  It was so humiliating the way she brought out her hand-wipes supply in public but I’d learnt, over the years, that it was a hell of a lot easier to go along with it than resist. I snatched one off her, gave my mitts a half-hearted pat. Mum kept yabbering, as a fat teenage boy walked past with a wobbling tower of soft-serve, showered in hundreds and thousands and drenched in strawberry syrup.

  ‘Rosemary, are you listening to me?’

  ‘What?’

  I willed fat-boy to stack it, for the tower of soft-serve to go all down the front of his big fat-boy belly, but he plonked the dessert down safe on the table.

  ‘There’s only one thing that will stand in your way.’ Mum was fishing around for an anchovy on her plate. ‘Do you know what that is, Rosemary?’

  ‘Mum, not now, OK? I’ve heard this all before.’

  ‘No, you listen to me. I know what I’m talking about.’ She pointed her fork at me, the hairy slug quivering on the end. ‘Men, Rosemary, once you get to university they’ll be everywhere. Hanging around you like a bad smell. Wanting to… ’ She bent over our plates and whispered, ‘get in your undies’, her frosted apricot lips spitting out the words.