The Dark Part of Me

by Belinda Burns

  Hollie dragged me back into the bedroom and dived on the bed. She rolled onto her side, her head propped against the fluffy cushions, her body rocking with the gentle motion of the waterbed.

  ‘I saw you,’ she said, coyly.

  ‘When?’ I was perched at the foot of the bed.

  ‘Before. You were doing this.’ Laughing, Hollie ran a hand down the front of her flat chest. ‘You looked sexy.’ She slid down against the pillows, shimmying her dress up her thighs.

  ‘I wasn’t doing anything.’ I crossed over to the window and looked down at the party, which had degenerated into a full-on backyard piss-up. Boxes of Domino’s pizza and Big Rooster chicken were being passed around. The men had ditched their jackets and bowties. Madame Butterfly had been swapped for Abba’s Greatest Hits and the women were jigging around barefoot on the grass to ‘Mamma Mia’.

  ‘Pack of bevans,’ I said. ‘They’ll be pissing in the fishpond next.’ I turned to Hollie. ‘We’d better get down there.’ She was kneeling on the waterbed. As the surface dipped and bobbed, she swayed from side to side, her dress ruched so high I could see the white crotch of her knickers showing through her pantyhose. She beckoned to me.

  ‘Come here.’ She stood up shakily, her dress bunched around her waist. ‘I want to tell you a secret.’ She lost her balance and lurched for the wall. ‘A secret about Danny and me.’ She started undoing her buttons, popping them open one by one. Her bodice undone to the waist, she slipped her arms out of the sleeves and pulled the dress down over her hips. The skin on her stomach and her chest was as white as her geisha-ed face and she was the skinniest I’d ever seen her. She stepped out of the crumpled dress and kicked it across the room towards me.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she purred, flinging herself backwards onto the bed. ‘Kiss me like we’re lovers. Kiss me on my dead mum’s bed.’ She sighed theatrically and closed her eyes.

  I stood, watching her wriggle and squirm on the satin, her back arched like a vixen. It was just like all the other times, except this Hollie was more confident, more alluring, and the change in her was exhilarating. For a moment, it caught me off guard but then we’d been playing this game since we were ten years old. I climbed onto the bed and crawled towards her head. She sank back, a faint smile curling her lips. I sat up on my heels next to her head. Her face was porcelain perfect, like I could have crushed it in my hands. I reached out and stroked her cheek. White powder came off on my fingers. With her eyes still closed, she held out her hand. I pressed my lips to her palm, then all the way up her arm, leaving a red-lipstick trail, like bites on her skin. She stretched and sighed, tossing her head from side to side on the pillow like Cathy in her death fever.

  ‘Hollie. Look at me,’ I said.

  Her eyes flashed open. I leant in and pashed her. She clasped my face in her hands and she looked so serious that I laughed and tipped sideways onto the bed. Lying back, I stared at the ceiling, which was littered in glow-in-the-dark stars I’d never noticed before. There was the Southern Cross and the Saucepan and the Milky Way.

  ‘Rosie?’ Hollie sat up on one elbow and looked at me, her eyes crazy-bright. Something cold brushed against my stomach. I jerked up. My skirt was up around my hips and Hollie’s fingers were hooked under the waistband of my undies.

  ‘What are you doing?’ My heart raced and I felt breathless. Hollie stared at me, all white face and smudged red lips.

  ‘I want to touch you,’ she said, evenly. ‘Please. Let me.’ She tried to push me down by the shoulders, but horrified, I shot off the bed. The faint sound of breaking glass came from downstairs. A cheer went up. A chorus of men shouting, ‘Taxi!’ followed by raucous laughter.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said, sharply.

  ‘Where?’ She came after me.

  ‘Out.’ I decided, in that moment, to go to the rave after all.

  ‘You can’t leave me!’ she screamed, grabbing me by the chopsticks in my hair and pulling me back towards the bed.

  ‘Let go. You’re hurting me.’ She was acting like a total psycho.

  ‘I won’t let you leave me.’ She tugged hard at my hair but I bit her on the arm. She cried out as I ran towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she demanded.

  ‘To a rave.’

  ‘With him,’ she spat.

  ‘Maybe.’

  Her eyes shone hot with outrage and confusion, her lips twisted and furrowed like a kabuki mask.

  ‘What the fuck’s wrong with you, Hollie?’ I stood in the doorway, glaring at her.

  ‘Just go!’ she screamed.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, and walked out, slamming the door behind me.

  Downstairs, the party had deteriorated into further bogan chaos. Midnight Oil was on the stereo and men were head-banging or playing air guitar on the deck, singing tunelessly into empty beer cans. Two women sat big-bottomed on the jade sculpture, shovelling great slabs of chocolate gateau into their gobs. The waiters had shed their kimonos and were splashing about the fishpond in their undies. Danny wasn’t anywhere. As I pushed through the crowd, I was relieved to be getting away from the party and from Hollie. It was just like her to take things too far. Sure, she was drunk but she’d never been like that with me before and it felt strange. We’d crossed some kind of line. The way she’d looked at me, the way she’d slipped her fingers inside my knickers, it wasn’t just our usual fantasy act. It was like she was serious

  I jogged down the drive, as best as I could in the geisha get-up, towards my car. The party hubbub faded to a muted hum, drowned out by the crickets pulsing around me like a force field. There was a full moon and the track up the side of Mount Coot-tha shone luminescent-white as a fresh scar. Bats swooped low over my head, blotting out the night sky. The bush was black, faceless, throbbing, as I hurried across the cul-de-sac. Eager to be inside the car, I fumbled and dropped my keys in the darkness and, as I bent down to pick them up, something hard and sharp pressed against my back. My heart turned cold. There was a foul stench and the touch of hot breath on my neck. I didn’t dare look around and my throat went too dry to scream.

  ‘Where you going?’ There was something familiar about the gruff male voice but I couldn’t place it.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said, trembling.

  ‘Turn around.’ He pulled the blade away from my back. I spun around and gasped. Drenched in moonlight was a tall, dark-skinned man. His hair was black and matted with dirt. His teeth shone bone white. He was naked with orange and white markings all over his chest and arms. At his side, he carried a long thin stick, at one end the sharp point I’d felt against my back. The carcass of a small animal was draped over his left shoulder. Apart from his nose, which was thin and narrow, he looked like an aborigine.

  ‘Me, Danny-Dilly.’ He took a step backwards and lunged at me with the spear.

  ‘Danny?’

  ‘You, Rosie-Maroo,’ he said.

  ‘Fucking hell.’ I tried to wrench the spear from his grip but he was too strong. ‘You scared the crap out of me. Where the hell have you been? Hollie’s going nuts.’

  ‘Me hunting,’ he said, his face stern, his black eyes glinting like mica. ‘You roast yams.’

  ‘Stop talking like that,’ I said, checking him over. ‘You’re filthy. You mustn’t have eaten for days.’ He was so skinny that each time he breathed it looked as though ribs would poke right through his mud-caked skin. ‘Go inside and have a shower. Not through the backyard or you’ll freak everyone out.’ I wagged my finger at him. ‘And get rid of that dead animal. It stinks.’ I slid inside the car and slammed the door, but he just stood there, on one leg, leaning against his spear-stick. I wound down the window. ‘Go on. Get. I’m already late.’

  In one swift movement, he stuck his head inside the car. The white teeth and the bulging eye-whites in that big dark head of his were frightening and I had to keep reminding myself it was only Danny.

  ‘Where are you going?’ This time he spoke normally.

  ‘To a rave i
n the Valley. Now pack it in, Danny. Get that mud off you, then go see your sister.’ I revved the car but still he wouldn’t budge.

  ‘Who are you going with?’ he persisted.

  ‘None of your business.’ I placed my palm against his filthy forehead and pushed his head out of the car. Releasing the handbrake, I rolled the car backwards down the hill. For a while he jogged beside me with his spear, shouting out all sort of bullshit about death and evil spirits and bloody revenge. I switched the radio on for some hardcore to drown him out. At the bottom of the hill, I did a slick three-point turn and looked back up the road, but he’d disappeared. I called Trish to tell her I was coming after all and she screamed down the mobile:

  ‘We’re gonna rave our tits off, Rosebud, rave our tits right fucking off!’

  14

  When I got to Trish’s, we snorted some whiz and she said I looked real sexy in my geisha-girl gear. She told me to leave my makeup on for effect and, with a pair of kitchen scissors, she hacked a metre or more off the bottom of my dress until it was so short you could see my undies when I bent over. Trish was dressed like the devil with her hair dyed traffic-light red and gelled into horns on top of her head. Her face sparkled with red glitter and she wore red PVC fuck-me boots that reached mid-thigh. In her satin hot pants and sequinned bra-top, she could have been a trannie. There was not a skerrick of fat on her tummy, and her tits, tight and firm as tennis balls, were more pec than boob.

  The devil and the geisha-girl – what a pair of weirdo freaks!

  Before we left, I used Dad’s one hundred and twenty smacks to buy two green elephants off Trish. I dropped one and kept the other for later. Trish took her second for the night. She reckoned fast driving brought them on quicker so we sped into the Valley, running red lights and doing eighty along Coro Drive. We turned the hardcore up so loud the car bolts rattled and my jaw shook.

  When we got to Arena, we had to queue outside. Across the road, in their usual Valley posse, were the local aborigines, propped up against the wall, sucking booze wrapped in brown paper. They were all wearing flannelette shirts and filthy trousers; not like schizo Danny at all, naked with his spear and his bush kill and his tribal body markings. Dad reckoned aborigines were all dole-bludgers who couldn’t handle their booze. Mum’d told me how once, when he was maggot from an all-day session at the pub, Dad and one of his mates, Bill Simmons, got to calling them names down the bar. Egged on by their women, the aborigines led it outside. Bill, reserves rugby player for Queensland, loved a fight but Dad jumped the fence as soon as he got the chance, leaving his mate surrounded. Looking across at the aborigines now, there was something about them that made me uncomfortable, a bit scared even. Perhaps it was the way they looked right through me with sad, dead eyes. I had no idea what they were thinking.

  Trish had moved along the line so I caught up to her. Everyone was checking each other out as if it was a big competition to wear the most freaked-out shit. I could tell the other bunnies, with their boring tiny-tees, tartan minis and pig-tails, were wishing they’d come as a sexy devil like Trish. It felt good being with someone so hardcore. No one could tell I’d never been raving. Scott would be impressed. I was getting that bad, sexy feeling in my stomach, which probably meant the elephant was brewing up. Soon as I spotted Scott, I’d go right up and roast him for bailing and then, once I’d made him grovel, I’d pash him all hot and sexy with my thigh wedged between his legs. Yeah, he was a prick but I still wanted him.

  Trish was dancing on the spot. Her feet were glued to the pavement, her arms taut and pumping at her sides. Her eyes were huge and bulging with no white around the edges. She grinned at me. ‘I’m fucking rank, Rosebud.’

  ‘Yeah, I think it’s kicking in. My legs feel all tingly.’

  ‘I’m so fucking rank,’ she repeated, as the queue surged forwards and we crossed the threshold. We paid the twenty smacks cover and got a fluoro wrist-band with Oblivion stamped round it. Trish was body-searched but they waved me through. I walked down a dark tunnel and waited for her at the end, feeling the bass was coming up through my toes, itching to get into it. Trish rocked up, saying that everything was sweet and that they hadn’t got the gear because, as she told me, ‘I shoved it up my fanny.’ We pushed through a black curtain and I was hit by the hugeness of it. Arena had five or six levels, stretching upwards into the swirling clouds of dry-ice, banded with neon pink and yellow and orange lasers. DJs were playing different types of techno on each floor – hardcore, trance, trip-hop, ambient and acid-house. Around us, ravers cut through the haze, quick-limbed and bug-eyed under the strobes, drinking bottled water, their eyes shining white and huge in set-jaw faces. I saw lips blurring, mouths opening, but no sound came out. It was like being in a silent movie; the hardcore drowned out everything.

  I tagged along behind Trish, all the time scanning for Scott through the haze. We skirted around the hardcore dancefloor, where the guys wore baggy pants with their undies poking out the top, no shirts and fluoro whistles strung around chicken necks. They all had shaved heads and their pale skins glowed sickly green under the lights. The hardcore chicks looked pretty much like Trish, short and runty with spiked hair and snappable arms. It didn’t look much like Scott’s scene, though. I was busting to go and find him but Trish wanted the loos. She yanked me into a cubicle and locked the door. Lickety-split, she had the gear out of her undies. She kicked down the loo-lid and shoved the eckys, wrapped in tin-foil, down her bra-top. She tipped a small pyramid of the speed onto the lid, re-sealed the bag and handed it to me. I stood in the corner watching as she racked up lines and crouched down over the toilet.

  ‘Fucked a guy in here once,’ she said, sniffing.

  ‘Really?’ The place stank and there was hardly any room.

  ‘Yep. He snorted off my arse then did me doggy. There was a massive queue, chicks were yelling at us to get out but we were so fucked we didn’t give a shit. Some stupid bitch tried to crawl in under the door but I stuck my boot in her face.’

  ‘Did you ever see him again?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy.’

  ‘Nah. Maybe. He was German or something. We didn’t speak much. He had these big, hard hands and he kept spanking me on the butt, over and over, until he shot his load. It hurt like fuck.’ She grinned. ‘Want the last line?’

  ‘Yeah. Alright,’ I said, trying not to think about all the nasty herpes and hepatitis germs wriggling around on top of the loo-lid. I snorted. Pronto my heart beat faster. Trish took the eckys from her bra-top, swallowed another one and offered me my second.

  ‘Nah.’ I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I’ll save it.’

  ‘After a while, you get immune like me,’ she laughed. ‘I’m coming down already.’

  Handing me the speed bag and the eckys, she flicked up the loo-lid with the toe of her boot, pulled down her daks and squatted for a piss.

  ‘I’m keen to hook up with Scott and the guys,’ I said, looking the other way.

  ‘Yeah, alright babe,’ she said, ‘but when I start peaking we gotta be raving, OK?’

  I nodded, wondering what level Scott might be on. I reckoned he’d be in the chill-out room. Trish dried off, grabbed the gear off me and shoved it back down her undies. From her bra-top, she pulled a packet of spearmint chewy and handed me a stick. ‘Stop you getting lock-jaw.’ As soon as I put the gum in my mouth, I couldn’t stop chewing. I was a fucking crazy chewing machine. I grinned some more at Trish and we headed back out.

  I wasn’t too into the hardcore crowd, a pack of zealy-eyed, weaselly-faced speed freaks, but Trish pushed her way right into the middle and started psycho-raving. I hung back on the edge, watching her dance – her jaw clenched, her fists churning like pistons – until she disappeared into the mists of dry-ice. I slipped away, following a group of ravers through a velvet curtain in the wall, vibing Scott to be on the other side.

  The first thing was the moon. It hung bright as a floodlight in the inky sky, illuminating a sea of bobbi
ng faces fixed with rapturous smiles and unblinking eyes. My heart slowed as if falling under its command, its calming gaze, and I felt normal again. I took a deep breath and looked around. The area, about the size of a basketball court, was covered in fake grass and enclosed on all sides by a six-foot wire fence over which a few freeloaders were scrambling. At one end, around an open stage, ravers danced in loose and fluid movements, spinning and twirling. The music was tribal trance, ambient techno mixed with native Afro beats. Centre-stage was a giant black DJ in a sarong. To the side, three smaller African guys played bongo drums of varying size. There was no artificial smoke or flashing strobes, just the moonlight coating everything in silver.

  The beat came to me in waves, washing over me. It was hypnotic. I found myself drifting further and further into the crowd, as if pulled by a magnetic force towards the stage. There was no resistance, the bodies around me parting to let me through. I danced, a warm glow suffusing my limbs. Unlike the hardcore freaks inside, ravers swayed and chanted, mellow and non-threatening. As each track slid into the other, the DJ didn’t speak. The moon seemed to smile down on me with love and god-like benevolence. I opened my eyes as wide as possible to take in its every blemish, it shadowy cracks and crevices. I was filled with a painful longing. And I knew that all around me everyone felt the same as, arms above our heads, we reached for the moon’s embrace, blissfully ensnared. I felt the ecky in me, lumbering through my veins, thick and viscousy, soaking into my brain. Across every inch of my body, I could feel my pores expanding, widening, getting wet. I wanted to be fucked by the moon, fucked by the music. Scott flashed through my mind but he was small and distant, a tiny speck compared with my new lunar lover.

  Strange how just then, I spotted him. He was dancing right in front of me, Bomber and Muzza on either side. A bolt of excitement ripped through me. He’d probably been there all along. He was wearing a navy-blue Bonds singlet, tight checked pants and his old Converse. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail, revealing the nape of his neck glistening with sweat. He was wearing a necklace of amber beads. I sidled up behind him and covered his eyes with my hands.