by David Miller
We drove out to the whaling station where the waters of the bay were lit with oily prisms and the air putrid with the steam of boiling blubber. I puked before I even saw anything. At the guardrail above the flensing deck, I tried to avoid splashing my granny sandals. Boner brought me a long, grimy bar towel to clean myself up with. He was grinning. He pointed out the threshing shadows in the water, the streaking fins, the eruptions on the surface.
Horrible, I said.
He shrugged and drove me back to town.
Although everyone at school assumed that Boner and I were doing the deed every time I climbed into his van, there was neither sex nor romance between us. Erin and the others could not imagine the peculiarity of our arrangement. There was, of course, some longing on my part. I yearned to kiss him, be held by him. After the reputation I’d earned it seemed only fair to have had that much, but Boner did not like to be touched. There was no holding of hands. If I cornered him, wheedling and vamping for a kiss, his head reared back on his neck until his Adam’s apple looked fit to bust free.
The closest I ever got to him was when I pierced his ears. I campaigned for a week before he consented. It began with me pleading with him and ended up as a challenge to his manhood. One Sunday I climbed in with ice, Band-Aids, and a selection of needles from my mother’s dusty sewing box. We parked out off the lowlands road where I straddled him on the seat and held his head steady. A few cars blew by with their horns trailing off into the distance. The paddocks were still. I pressed ice to Boner’s earlobes and noticed that he’d come out in a sweat. He smelled of lanolin and smokes and that piney scent. When he closed his eyes, the lids trembled. I revelled in the luxury of holding him against the seat. I lingered over him with a bogus air of competence. Like a rider on a horse I simply imposed my will. At the moment I drove the needle through his lobe I clamped him between my thighs and pressed my lips to his clammy forehead. He was so tense, so completely shut down in anticipation of contact, that I doubt he felt a thing.
For a few weeks my riding with Boner brought me more glamour than disgrace. The new hippy teachers gave me credit for pushing social boundaries, for my sense of adventure and lack of snobbery. To them my little rebellion was refreshing, spirited, charming. They preferred it to my being the dutiful daughter of the council inspector. I knew what they thought of homes like ours with the red-painted paths and plaster swans. Their new smiles said it all. But when my experiment proved more than momentary their Aquarian indulgence withered. They despised boys like Boner as much as my parents would have, had they known him, and after a while my feisty rebellion seemed little more than slumming. Boner was no winsome Woodstock boy. He was a toughie from the abattoir. My young teachers’ sisterly hugs gave way to stilted homilies. Free love was cool but a girl didn’t want to spread her favours too thin, did she. I grimaced and smirked until they left me alone.
The gossip at school was brutal. In the talk, the passed notes, the toilet scrawl, I sucked Boner McPharlin, I sucked other boys, I sucked anybody. And more. At the drives Boner hired me out, car to car, Jackie Martin meatworker. Slack Jackie. The slander hurt but I bore it as the price of love. Because I did love him. And anyway, I thought, let them talk, the ignoramuses. Part of me enjoyed the status, the bitter satisfaction of being solitary but notable. I was, in this regard, my father’s daughter.
I could bear the vile talk behind my back, but all the icy silence on the surface wore me down. I had enough remoteness at home. And Boner himself barely said a word. I craved some human contact. The only people who would speak to me were the opportunists and the outcasts, boys newly-emboldened to try their luck and hard-faced sluts with peroxided fringes who wanted to know how big Boner’s bone was. The boys I sent packing but the rough chicks I was stuck with. They were a dim and desperate lot with which to spend a lunch hour.
At first they were as suspicious of me as they were curious. I was a cardigan-wearing interloper, a slumming dilettante. Their disbelief at Boner’s having chosen me was assuaged in time by the incontrovertible fact of it, for there I was every afternoon cruising by in the van. I didn’t challenge the legend. On the contrary, I nurtured it. By nods and winks at first and later with outright lies. I told them what they wanted to hear, what I read in Cleo and Forum, the stuff I knew nothing about. It seemed harmless enough. We were just girls, I thought, fakers, kids making ourselves up as we went along. But the things I was lying through my teeth about were the very things these girls were doing. That and much more. And they had the polaroids to prove it.
Only when I saw those photos did I begin to understand how stupid my playacting had been. One lunchtime five of us crammed into a smoky toilet stall, our earrings jangling with suppressed laughter. The little prints were square, felt gummy in my hands, and it took me several moments to register what I was looking at. God knows what I was expecting, which fantasy world I’d been living in, but I can still feel the horrible fake grin that I hid behind while my stomach rolled and my mind raced. So this was what being Slack Jackie really meant. Not just that kids thought you were doing things like this with Boner McPharlin; they believed you did them with anybody, everybody, two and three at a time, reducing yourself to this, a grimacing, pink blur, a trophy to be passed around in toilets and toolsheds all over town. All the gossip had been safely abstract but the polaroids were galvanizing. With all my nodding and winking I’d let these creatures believe that I was low enough to have mementoes like this myself, conquests that would bind us to one another. I’d never felt so young, so isolated, so ill. Those girls had already lived another life, moved in a different economy. They understood that they had something men and boys wanted. For them sex was not so much pleasure or even adventure but currency. And I was just a romantic schoolgirl. Maybe they suspected it all along.
I didn’t go to pieces there in the fug of the cubicle but afterwards I subsided into a misery I couldn’t disguise. I had always believed I could endure what people thought of me. If it wasn’t true, I thought, how could it matter? But I’d gone from letting people think what they would to actually lying about myself. I’d fallen in with people whose view of life was more miserable and brutish than anything I’d ever imagined. It was as though I’d extinguished myself.
I went to class in a daze. The teacher took one look at me and sent me to the sick room.
Are you late with your period? asked the nurse.
I could only stare in horror.
You can imagine how the news travelled. I’m sure the nurse was discreet. The talk probably started the moment I left the class. Jackie went to the sick room. Jackie was sick at school. Jackie was bawling her eyes out. Jackie’s got a bun in the oven.
It wasn’t that I refused to answer the nurse’s question. I was simply trying so hard not to cry that I couldn’t speak. And saying nothing was no help at all.
During the final term of that year I went back to being a schoolyard solitary. I spent hours in the library to avoid scrutiny and to stave off panic, and the renewed study brought about a late rally in my marks. I heard the rumours about my ‘condition’ and did my best to ignore them. The only thing more surprising than my good marks was the new pleasure they gave me. It was all that kept me from despair.
I still felt a bubble of joy rise to my throat when Boner burbled up but it didn’t always last out the ride. On weekends, as spring brought on the uncertain promise of the southern summer, I took to wearing a bikini beneath my clothes and I badgered Boner to let me out at the beaches we drove to. I couldn’t sit in the car anymore. I wanted to bodysurf, to strike out beyond the breakers and lie back with the sun pressing pink on my eyelids. I wanted him there, too, to hold his hand in the water, for him to feel me splashing against him. But there wasn’t a chance of it happening. He let me out but I had to swim alone. The beaches were mostly empty. There was nobody to see my flat belly. The water was cold and forceful and after swimming I lay sleepy-warm on a towel. The best Boner could do was to squat beside me in his Johnny Reb boots
with a rolly cupped in his palm.
I began to demand more of Boner. Perhaps it was a renewed confidence from good marks and maybe it was a symptom of a deeper bleakness, a sense of having nothing left to lose. Either way I peppered him with questions about himself, things I hadn’t dared ask before. I wanted to know about his family, the details of his job, his honest opinions, where he wanted to be in ten years’ time, and his only responses were shrugs and grins and puckerings and far-off looks. When I asked what he thought of me he murmured, You’re Jackie. You’re me navigator.
I didn’t find it charming; I was irritated. Even though it dawned on me that Boner was lonely – lonelier than I’d ever been, lonely enough to hang out with a fifteen-year-old – I felt a gradual loss of sympathy. I could sense myself tiring of him, and I was guilty about it, but his silence began to seem idiotic and the aimless driving bored me. With no one else to speak to, I’d worn myself out prattling on at him. I’d told him so much, yearned so girlishly, and gotten so little in return.
The weather warmed up. The van was hot to ride in. The upholstery began to give off a stink of sweat and meat. I found shotgun shells in the glovebox. Boner wouldn’t discuss their presence. I found that a whole day with him left me depleted. I missed being a girl on foot, I wanted the antic talk of other girls, even their silly, fragile confidences. Boner wouldn’t speak. He couldn’t converse. He couldn’t leave the van. He wouldn’t even swim.
I tried to find a kind way to tell him that it wasn’t fun anymore but I didn’t have the courage. One Saturday I simply didn’t go to the Esso. On Sunday I helped my startled mother make Christmas puddings. The next week I stayed in and read Papillon. I watched ‘Aunty Jack’. When I did venture out I avoided places where Boner might see me. It was only a few days before he found me. I heard him ease in beside me on the road home from school. I felt others watching. I leant in to the open window.
Ride, Jack? he murmured.
Nah, I said. Not anymore. But thanks.
He shrugged and dragged on his rolly. For a moment I thought he’d say something but he just chewed his lip. I knew I’d hurt him and it felt like a betrayal, yet I walked away without another word.
Every summer my parents took me to the city for a few weeks. I was always intimidated and selfconscious, certain that the three of us were instantly identifiable as bumpkins, though I loved the cinemas and shops, the liberating unfamiliarity of everybody and everything in my path. That year, after the usual excursions, we walked through the grounds of the university by the river’s edge. The genteel buildings were surrounded by palms and lemon-scented gums and here and there, in cloisters or against limestone walls, were wedding parties and photographers and knots of overdressed and screaming children.
I sensed a sermon in the wings, a parable about application to schoolwork, but my father was silent. As we walked the verandahs he seemed to drink in every detail. There was a softness, a sadness to his expression that I’d never seen before. He rubbed his moustache, wiped his brow on the towelling hat he wore on these trips, and sauntered off alone.
What’s with Dad? I asked. Did you guys have your wedding pictures taken here, or something?
My mother sat on a step in her boxy frock. Sweat had soaked through her polka dots to give her a strangely riddled look.
No, dear, she said. He wanted to be an architect, you know. Thirty years is a long time to have regrets.
I stood by her a while. Despite the languor of her tone I sensed that we’d come to the edge of something important together. I could feel the ghosts of their marriage hovering within reach, the story behind their terrible quiet almost at hand, and I hesitated, wanting and not wanting to hear more. But she snapped open her bag and pulled out her compact and the moment was gone, a flickering light gone out.
On the long hot drive home that summer I thought about the university and the palpable disappointment of my parents’ lives. I wondered if the excursion to the campus had been an effort on their part to plant a few thoughts in my head. Consciously or not they’d shown me a means of escape.
In the new school year I more or less reinvented myself. Until that point, except for my connection with Boner, I had believed that I was average; in addition to being physically unremarkable I assumed I wasn’t particularly smart either. The business with Boner was, I decided, an aberration, an episode. For the bulk of my school life I’d embraced the safety of the median. And now, effectively friendless, with the image of the university and its shady cloisters as a goad, I became a scowling bookworm, a girl so serious, so fixed upon a goal, as to be unapproachable. I never did return to the realm of girly confidences. Friends, had I found them, would have been a hindrance. In an academic sense I began to flourish. I saw myself surrounded by dolts. Contempt was addictive. In a few months I left everyone and everything else in my wake.
Of course no matter what I did my louche reputation endured. These things are set in stone. Baby booties and condoms were folded into my textbooks. The story went that Boner had dropped me for not having his child, that he was out to get me somehow, that my summer trip to Perth had involved a clinic. Last year’s polaroid tarts were all gone now to Woolworths and the cannery, there was nobody to share the opprobrium with. Yet I felt it less. My new resolve and confidence made me haughty. I was fierce in a way that endeared me to neither students nor staff. I was sarcastic and abrupt, neither eager to please nor easy to best. I was reconciled to being lonely. I saw myself in Rio, Bombay, New York; being met at airports, ordering room service, solving problems on the run. I’d already moved on from these people, this town. I was enjoying myself. I imagined an entire life beyond being Boner McPharlin’s moll.
Boner was still around of course. He wasn’t as easy to spot because he drove an assortment of vehicles. Apart from the van there was a white Valiant, a flatbed truck and a Land Rover that looked like something out of Born Free. Our eyes met, we waved, but nothing more. There was something unresolved between us that I didn’t expect to deal with. Word was that the meatworks had sacked him over some missing cartons of beef. There were stories about him and his father duffing cattle out east and butchering them with chainsaws in valley bottoms. There was talk of stolen car parts, electrical goods, two-day drives to the South Australian border, meetings on tuna boats. If these whispers were true – and I knew enough by now to have my doubts – then the police were slow in catching them. There were stories of Boner and other girls, but I never saw any riding with him.
Town seemed uglier the year I turned sixteen. There was something feverish in the air. At first I thought it was just me, my new persona and the fresh perspective I had on things, but even my father came home with talk of break-ins, hold-ups, bashings.
The first overdose didn’t really register. I wasn’t at the school social – I was no longer the dancing sort – so I didn’t see the ambulancemen wheel the dead girl out of the toilets. I didn’t believe the talk in the quad. I knew better than to listen to the bullshit that blew along the corridors, all the sudden talk about heroin. But that overdose was only the first of many. Smack became a fact of life in Angelus. The stuff was everywhere and nobody seemed able or inclined to do a thing about it.
It was winter when Boner McPharlin was found out at Thunder Beach with his legs broken and his face like an aubergine. They made me wait two days before I could see him. At the hospital there were plainclothes cops in the corridor and one in uniform outside the door. The scrawny constable let me in without a word. Boner was conscious by then, though out of his tree on morphine. He didn’t speak. His eyes were swollen shut. I’m not even sure he knew who I was. With his legs full of bolts and pins he looked like a ruined bit of farm machinery.
I stayed for an hour, and when I left a detective fell into step beside me. He was tall with pale red hair. He offered me a lift. I told him no thanks, I was fine. He called me Jackie. I was still rocked by the sight of Boner. The cop came downstairs with me. He seemed friendly enough, though in the lobby he aske
d to see my arms. I rolled up my sleeves and he nodded and thanked me. He asked about Boner’s enemies. I told him I didn’t know of any. He said to leave it with him; it was all in hand. I plunged out into the rain.
I visited Boner every day after school but he wouldn’t speak. I was chatty for a while but after a day or so I took my homework with me, a biology text or The Catcher in the Rye. For a few days there were cops on the ward or out in the carpark, but then they stopped coming. The nurses were kind. They slipped me cups of tea and hovered at my shoulder for a peek at what I was reading. When the swelling went down and his eyes opened properly, Boner watched me take notes and mark pages and suck my knuckles. Late in the week he began to writhe around and shake. The hardware in his legs rattled horribly.
Open the door, he croaked.
Boner, I said. Are you alright? You want me to call a nurse?
Open the door. Don’t ever close the door.
I got up and pulled the door wide. There was a cop in the corridor, a constable I didn’t recognize. He spun his cap in his hands. He was grey in the face. He tried to smile.
You okay, Boner? I said over my shoulder.
Gotta have it open.
I went back and sat by the bed. I caught myself reaching for his hand.
Least you can talk, I murmured. That’s something.
Not me, he said.
You can talk to me, can’t you?
He shook his battered head slowly, with care. I sucked at a switch of hair, watched him tremble.
What happened?
Don’t remember, he whispered. Gone.
Talk to me, I said in a wheedling little voice. Why do you want the door open?
Can’t read, you know. Not properly. Can’t swim neither.
I sat there and licked my lips nervously. I was sixteen years old and all at sea. I didn’t know how to respond. There were questions I was trying to find words for but before I could ask him anything he began to talk.