The Whole Bright Year

by Debra Oswald

  ‘If he’s in trouble with the police, would you be able to ask around your Sydney cop mates and find out?’

  ‘Well, possibly . . .’ Joe winced.

  ‘Please, Joe. I’ve got nothing against this kid, but I’ve got them staying on my place.’

  ‘I’m sorry if bringing them here was a mistake.’

  ‘No, don’t apologise. You rescued me, bringing them,’ Celia assured him. ‘I just need to know whether I should worry. Can you find out? Please.’

  ‘Even if Kieran’s been a bit wild, a lot of kids go through that. And if Zoe learns to deal with – I mean, you can’t world-proof her.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I pick out a path for my child through the minefield – to whatever extent I can?’

  ‘But you can’t limit the natural kind of – the natural sort of —’

  ‘You wouldn’t let nature take its course if a wild dog leapt into a baby’s cot.’

  ‘No, but a small baby isn’t the same as a sixteen-year-old.’

  ‘I know.’

  The next moment, they both heard footsteps on the hall rug and the conversation was over.

  ‘What were you guys talking about?’ Zoe asked, leaning in the kitchen doorway. But she didn’t wait for either of them to answer. ‘Mum’s doing the worried face. She thinks I can’t see it, but I’ve been copping that face all day.’

  Joe took a breath to respond but Celia threw him a look – Leave it.

  Before Zoe or Celia could say anything more, there was an infuriated shriek from Heather in the living room.

  ‘Enough! I’ll throw that wretched game in the bin if you can’t learn how to behave!’

  A squabble had flared between Hamish and Fergus to the point that they were jabbing each other with the sharp corners of the Mouse Trap pieces.

  ‘Joe? Joe!’ Heather barked through to the kitchen. ‘I told you we should have taken these two home half an hour ago! Can we please go now? Finally? Hamish, pick it up. Now. Now. Now. Pack the whole thing away quick sticks or I mean it, I will throw it in the bin.’

  Joe jumped to, to wrangle his sons. Celia and Zoe helped Heather carry platters, parcels of leftovers and presents out to their car. Hamish and Fergus were hustled into the back seat, faces pinched from being roused on by their mother, but fingers poking each other on the sly, ready to resume their dispute on the trip home.

  Celia and Zoe stood on Roza’s front verandah to wave the family goodbye.

  As Joe said his farewells, he tucked his head close to Celia to murmur, ‘Try not to worry so much. See how things go.’

  He kissed the top of Zoe’s head, the way he used to do when she was little. ‘Take care. See you guys soon.’

  Once Joe and his family had driven away, Zoe didn’t go straight back inside. She stepped off the verandah onto the grass. She did a few wandering dance steps around the front yard, barefoot, with the sheen of the blue silk dress catching the little bit of light that spilled from the house.

  Celia, leaning against one of the verandah posts, couldn’t tear her eyes away from her daughter. So lovely, it was almost painful to look at her. Celia usually kept her body taut with readiness to tackle whatever needed doing in the present or whatever problem might materialise in the future. Now, gazing at Zoe, all Celia’s limbs, her shoulders, her throat, her belly, melted with overwhelming love for this girl, and rendered her defenceless.

  ‘I can feel you staring,’ said Zoe.

  ‘I was thinking how beautiful you are.’

  ‘You want to reach into my head and check out every thought that’s in here.’

  Celia smiled. ‘You used to tell me every thought. But I know that time’s over.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I just want you to be careful.’

  ‘We haven’t had sex or anything,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Okay,’ said Celia cautiously.

  ‘That’s what you’re worried about, I assume.’

  ‘If I’m worried, it’s because you know so little about Kieran.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ said Zoe flatly.

  ‘I understand this is the first time you’ve – I get that you’re giddy with this.’

  Zoe twisted to face her mother, fierce. ‘No. You don’t want to understand. I can see from the way you’re setting your jaw, that warnings will come out of your mouth. The “what if”s and “always remembers”.’

  Celia flinched at Zoe’s excoriating tone. ‘But sweetheart, can’t I —’

  ‘No. Shut your mouth. I won’t listen to you pour poison on this. Shut your mouth.’

  Zoe strode around the side of Roza’s house and out of sight.

  Celia couldn’t move, as if pinned to the verandah post by a knife that had sliced right through her soft belly.

  *

  Zoe walked away from the house quickly, then even more quickly, until she was running up the slope. The impulse wasn’t to escape or hurry anywhere in particular – the running was to burn up the excess energy fizzing through her blood. Zoe had never defied her mother like that, never unleashed her full power at Celia before. She was afraid that something inside her would explode or the earth would lurch out of orbit or something – some terrible and potent aftershock. But nothing had happened. She was okay. Exhilarated. That was why her heart was pounding – this was exhilaration, not fear.

  The next thought in her head was overwhelming: she needed to see Kieran right now. She kept running until she saw a light shining at the end of the packing shed. Kieran was emerging from the lean-to bathroom, straight from the shower, wearing board shorts and sneakers, with a towel hanging over his bare chest.

  ‘What’s up? You okay?’ he asked, reaching for her.

  Zoe must’ve looked crazy to him – breathless, wild-eyed, gaping at Kieran but not letting him touch her. She gulped a breath, in order to summon up a coherent and mature voice. ‘I was thinking we should have sex now.’

  ‘Oh. Right. If you want to . . . uh . . .’

  If Kieran sounded freaked out, it was because this morning she’d told him her sexual experience was zero. Zoe knew she could be honest with him. And Kieran could be completely honest with her too. They’d already talked about the fact that he’d been fucking since he was fourteen. The first time, he’d been stoned, seduced by the 32-year-old woman who was shacked up with one of his stepfathers.

  So now, as Zoe blurted out her suggestion, Kieran hesitated. It felt like a long silence to her. Really, he only paused for two seconds. Less than two seconds. Then he said, ‘I mean, yes, yes . . . y’know, great. That’d be great.’

  He flicked the towel off his shoulder onto the ground with a jokey flourish and reached for Zoe. Again, she ducked out of his arms – if he touched her right now, it would mess with her head when she was determined to think clearly.

  ‘But what are my reasons for wanting to have sex with you? Would I just be using you?’

  Kieran laughed and lunged forward to slide his hands onto her hips. ‘You can use me. That’s cool. Use me.’

  Slipping sideways out of his grasp, Zoe went on. ‘But would I just be fucking you to rile up my mother? Or for the sake of getting rid of it? I’ve never understood why people say “losing virginity”. What are you losing? The absence of something. Which is nothing. Really you’re gaining non-virginity. You’re gaining sexual experience. Which in a way is – sorry, I’m yabbering at you.’

  ‘Which is cool. I just don’t know —’

  ‘Nervous. Sorry,’ she said. ‘But it’s complicated. I want to be sure what my reasons are. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s okay, Zoe. But I’m not sure what you want me to do. We can keep talking if —’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no.’ And she took his hand.

  The daylight was completely gone now, but even in the dark Zoe knew this place so well she could pick her way around the farm, finding a soft pathway for her bare feet. When they were close to the house, Kieran stopped.

  ‘Zoe, where are we going? We can’t – not
in your mum’s house.’

  ‘I know. Stay here a sec.’

  Zoe left Kieran to wait by the camellia hedge that formed a kind of dark wall between the packing shed and the garden of the house. She slipped inside to her room, without turning on the light, and fished around in her bedside drawer. Last term, a girl in her class, Donna, had brought a pack of condoms to school and paraded around, flashing the packet, skiting about how many guys she’d rooted. Donna had then flung the condoms onto the asphalt in front of other girls, like a queen throwing bread to starving peasants. Zoe had picked one up and taken it home. Now she retrieved it from its hiding place in the drawer. On her way back outside, she grabbed shoes, a torch and a rug from the laundry.

  By torchlight, the two of them hurried down the slope to the creek. Zoe flung the rug out over a patch of soft grass. She switched off the torch, then turned back to Kieran and puffed out a nervous laugh. After that burst of purposeful activity, she was suddenly frozen with embarrassment – until Kieran pulled her close, kissed her, and it felt right again.

  As Kieran slipped her dress off, Zoe realised he was also nervous.

  ‘Your hands are shaking,’ she said.

  Kieran looked down at his own hands. ‘Oh. Yeah.’

  ‘Why would you be nervous? You’ve done this before.’

  ‘Never when I wasn’t off my face on something.’

  ‘Which is different, I guess.’

  Kieran nodded and then dropped his head onto her bare shoulder. ‘And I’ve never done this with you.’

  ‘And what, that makes you nervous because —’

  ‘Doesn’t make me nervous,’ he said. ‘It amazes me.’

  She pulled him down onto the rug. Kieran was worried his palms would feel too rough on her skin, but she pointed out that her hands were just as shredded and callused from the picking work as his.

  Before now, Zoe had tried to form a useful working model of sex from Cleo magazine, bits she’d seen in Penthouse and scenes in movies. She’d then cross-checked that information with stuff girls at school had said. She was prepared for the fact that the first time was usually pretty lousy, something you just had to get through, that guys could be rushed and clumsy. But it wasn’t like that with Kieran. He kept stopping and checking she was okay, to such an extent that she started to get paranoid.

  ‘Don’t you really want to?’ she asked.

  Kieran laughed – well, it was a sort of breathless, strangled laughter, as if he were in pain. ‘Zoe. Fuck. Zoe . . . I’m an eighteen-year-old guy. I want to have sex every second I’m awake, and a major amount of the time I’m asleep. But I mean, this is different. I don’t want you to – if you’re not sure, I don’t want to, even though, fucking hell, I want to . . .’

  Zoe wanted to demonstrate she was sure, so she yanked down his board shorts and grabbed his cock. She wasn’t certain how much force she should use but it was important she not appear tentative.

  Kieran yelped with pain. So, she had, in fact, grabbed too hard.

  ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!’

  Kieran was groaning, his body scrunched up, but a few moments later he managed to joke, ‘Right. So, you are keen, then.’

  The two of them laughed, lying there while he recovered. Some of the nerves had been laughed away, breaking down the self-consciousness between them. This wasn’t a girl losing her virginity. This was them – Kieran and Zoe – and that was special and different and right.

  ‘Fucking hell, look at you. You’re beautiful,’ said Kieran.

  Zoe shook her head, but in fact, she believed he meant what he said. There was such intoxicating pleasure in having her body looked at – not her own critical gaze in the mirror, examining herself as a sexual entity in the abstract, for some hypothetical point in the future – but appreciated by the eyes and hands and mouth of someone who kept murmuring how gorgeous she was. There was pleasure too in getting her hands on the body she’d been staring at and imagining for days now. She was torn between the urge to focus on every second and record every sensation in her mind, and the desire to suspend normal consciousness.

  Afterwards, they lay on the rug, staring up into the dark mesh of the trees, happy to have the cool night air on their skin.

  ‘You okay?’ Kieran asked. ‘Was that okay?’

  She laughed and nodded, mock-earnest. It was better than she’d imagined. In fact, it wasn’t even right to think in those terms. There was no point applying some teenage-girl grading system she’d been carrying around in her head. This was more profound and incredible than anything her silly sixteen-year-old self could have imagined.

  Sheena sat on the front step of the cabin, swinging the door back and forth, trying to get a few slugs of fresher air mixed into the cube of stale gases inside.

  Kieran wasn’t offering much in the way of detail (thank Christ) but as Sheena understood it, he and Zoe had their first, apparently transcendent, fuck on the Picnic Rug of Love by the creek, and there was more of the same the following two nights.

  Sheena was angry in that way she could get sometimes, her gut manufacturing a corrosive substance that burned its way through her circulatory system. This time her anger was mostly directed at herself, for miscalculating the situation so stupidly. She’d banked on the Kieran and Zoe flirtation, even the displays of pashing in the orchard, being a diversion that would keep her brother safely in one spot, occupied and under her watchful eye. She hadn’t expected that Zoe – such a shielded kid – would take things all the way so quickly. They could at least have chosen to go at it in secret, but no, there was no secrecy about the consummation of their week-long acquaintance. Who knew the girl would shove this in her mother’s face so blatantly?

  The past two nights, after a session down at the creek with Zoe, Kieran had slipped back inside the cabin at one or two a.m. to grab a few hours’ kip. He’d try to be quiet but really, that was redundant. There was no risk he’d wake Sheena, because there was no risk she’d be asleep when he came in. Splayed out on the bunk bed, she was scrounging even less sleep than she usually did, and even then it wasn’t restorative. It was more like the crumbly dozing she did on long-distance bus journeys, frequently waking with unpleasant jolts and always unrefreshed.

  Sheena had let Kieran take the packet of condoms out of her toiletry bag – a packet left over from her last attempt at a relationship with the Dickless Wonder. Sheena herself had no need of condoms right now. The romantic offers weren’t exactly flying in. There was not a parade of available guys sauntering through the stone-fruit district of central New South Wales. And if one were to stumble across Sheena’s path, she would hardly be an arousing sight. She’d been avoiding looking at herself in the mirror – pretty easy here given the absence of reflective surfaces, other than the tiny mirror Kieran had propped against the corrugated-iron wall of the shower so he could shave. But Sheena had no doubt she was looking like a piece of shit. Her hands were roughened up from the picking work, so they were now leathery old dog chews. She’d stopped bothering to shave her legs and given up wearing eyeliner because it wasn’t a good mix with sun-cream and sweat. Her hair must be looking rank, with a stripe of brown regrowth because she hadn’t touched up the colour on the roots. Plus she was so exhausted – working from five every morning and worrying herself into a lather over Kieran – her face must surely be haggard.

  Sheena could make herself look attractive enough when she made an effort. She’d never been up herself, but the truth was, she was the kind of woman that certain kinds of men hit on, and she’d always had a decent strike rate with the guys she went after. But the way she was looking now – no chance. The point was, Kieran might as well take the condoms. It occurred to her that Celia could have the shits with Sheena for providing contraception to her daughter. She shouldn’t have the shits. At least this way there wouldn’t be a pregnancy to add to the mess.

  Zoe and Kieran were only managing three or four hours of sleep, max, but they were still working hard picking peaches, presumab
ly powered by whatever magic fuel was being produced in their bodies by all the sex at night.

  During the daytime, in the orchard, Sheena could feel the air crunching and hissing between Celia and Zoe. Whenever mother and daughter were in close proximity, the two of them held their bodies tight, avoiding eye contact and only addressing each other with the few necessary words the job required.

  Sheena was surprised Celia hadn’t gone ballistic. Possibly she was giving Zoe hell inside the privacy of their house, but Sheena didn’t get the sense that was happening. For Celia to see Kieran and Zoe together, knowing what was going on at the creek at night, it was astonishing the woman wasn’t shrieking and prising the two apart with a shovel, then slamming the tractor into Kieran before driving back and forth with its knobbly tyres over his pulpy body. Then again, Sheena realised why Celia wouldn’t do that. She couldn’t stop her sixteen-year-old daughter engaging in a legal activity, short of locking her in a cupboard. And arguably, a mother could choose to be relieved her daughter was conducting her sexual initiation with an eighteen-year-old and not a forty-something PE teacher with lips crusted with dried spit.

  Whatever was going on in Celia’s head, she kept slogging through the harvest tasks, looking more strung-out each day. As for Roza, the weird Hungarian lady, she watched the goings-on with a benign, knowing vibe as if she’d predicted it all. Sheena would happily slap that unnerving smile right off Roza’s face.

  Sheena was still sitting on the front step as Kieran walked back to the cabin from the shower – well, not so much walked as skipped through the orchard. Skipping, for God’s sake. Men who were getting plenty of sex were so predictable, even her drug-stewed little brother. Every guy she’d been with was the same: if they were in a grumpy mood for whatever reason, she could always cheer them up with a root. One minute, they’d be cranky or worried or sad, but then post-root, they’d grin like gormless dopes, prancing to the bathroom making lame jokes. Transforming a man’s mood really could be that simple. Once she’d cottoned on to how easy it was to manipulate their primitive psyches, it was even harder to respect them. Which was not to say Sheena wasn’t into sex herself. She missed it when she went too long without. But she wasn’t sure a bout of good sex was worth all the other bullshit that surrounded the procedure.