We made our way down to the house. There was orange juice in the fridge. Katie’s parents didn’t seem to be there. No one said hello to us as we came in; we just went to the kitchen. There was music, and kids smoking on the verandah. The moon was higher now, and paler. Sometimes there would be a surge of noise from the cicadas. I poured the rest of the tequila — still nearly half a bottle — into a tall, patterned glass and topped it up with orange juice. I took a huge, burning swallow and passed it to Judy. She took a deep breath, put it to her lips and drank the lot.
‘That was for me too!’ I said, but when she’d finished coughing she grinned at me and wiped her lips and eyes.
‘Now I’m ready,’ she said.
We had agreed to separate. Judy’s goal I secretly scorned: she was in love with Michael Brown from Year 12, a boy who was legendary for his beauty and kindness, who would probably not even be there. I was in love with him too. You couldn’t not be. He’d once stood up and offered me his seat on the sport bus, when hockey and football were being played at the same ground. The seat was warm when I sat down on it. Michael smiled at me, and I kept my thighs carefully propped up, so that they did not touch the seat, spread and look fat.
Judy’s goal was to talk to Michael, so that he might remember who she was, wonder about her, choose her, with her Titian hair, to model for his final work for art. This was the thing about Michael — he played sport like a hero, but always came top in art and English. After the modelling, he would not be able to get Judy out of his mind. Then he would get a scholarship to a school of art in Paris, and beg her to come with him, not even finishing her HSC. She would, and they would be so poor in Paris, on a single scholarship, that they would not have much to eat and she would lose a great deal of weight. It was a very satisfactory story, to which I’d contributed quite a lot. We’d come up with the weight-loss part together.
Judy went out one door of the kitchen and I went out the other. There was a can of beer on the floor outside, which I picked up and shook. It was half full. I peered into it to see if there were any cigarette butts. There were not, so I drank it. It helped with the warm and pleasant feeling I was beginning to have from the tequila. Hearing Raffaello’s voice from outside, I went to find him.
It was the tequila, undoubtedly. I said something which, years later, still has the power to make me shudder. It was unforgivable, as though I had learned nothing in the last four years of high school. I said: ‘Would you go out with me?’
This wasn’t an invitation to the movies or to see a band. It meant, be my boyfriend. Love me. I don’t think it had ever been said, in the history of North Hills High School, ever, by a girl.
Before Raffaello could answer, Andrew exploded next to him. I’d seen this performance before. It consisted of laughing so hard he cried. Of smacking his thighs, holding his aching sides, wiping his eyes.
I was still, suspended in myself, watching, waiting for the thigh-slapping and shrieking to stop. Even Raffaello did nothing. Eventually Andrew fetched back up against the wall of the house, panting, one last wipe of the eyes with the back of the hand, and said to me, ‘You! You think he’ll go out with you?’
Other kids were looking at us now, though none approached.
I was still waiting to fall dead on the spot, the effects of the tequila flushing downwards, leaving my head sore and clear.
‘I can’t see it,’ said Raffaello, looking at his feet.
‘Why not?’ I said. I had nothing left to lose.
He took a breath, and stared straight at me. ‘We’ve got nothing in common,’ he said; then added, ‘Everyone thinks you’re a lesbian.’
Andrew was silent now, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. I gave a push with my backside, heaved myself away from the wall. Someone, a girl, was calling me, in a stupid singsong voice that promised insult. You get so that you can identify this.
‘Tash-a,’ said Katie, as she came round the corner of the house, ‘your friend needs you. She’s spewing.’
On Thursday afternoons Judy’s mother went to her singing class and Judy came to my house. She was old enough to be left alone, but it had been happening so long, and it suited us both. Friday was the day homework was always due; on Thursdays we sat at the kitchen table, stuffed ourselves with toast and peanut butter, and did our work together, comparing, criticising, helping each other.
My mother hadn’t been able to castigate me for drunkenness — I was too old to let her get away with that — but I’d had to get Judy’s vomit out of the car myself and then pay for it to be cleaned. I used a trowel from the garden and a pair of washing-up gloves. Then I had to look in the yellow pages for the car-cleaning service. It was six weeks’ pocket money.
And of course my mother was not above making Judy feel terrible. The smell would never go away, she told us, and she was too poor to be thinking about buying another car. She said this while she was looking in the back of the pantry to see if she had forgotten any bottles of wine or scotch. She was on her hands and knees, moving the tall jars of flour and rice that never got used up. She had that look on her face — belligerent, preoccupied, but ready to be angrier if it was needed. She looked exactly like the woman on top of the bookshelf in the Thurber cartoon.
‘Look, Jude,’ I said, nudging her. ‘That’s my first wife over there.’
Judy looked, and some spit went down the wrong way, and she choked with laughter. My mother glared at us. Of course there were no hidden bottles of scotch or wine. There had been, but I’d drunk them.
It didn’t last forever. It was easy to see that no one would ever forget, and if Judy ever made another mistake, if she ever did something like fart in class or vomit from bus-sickness (which she’d been known to do), we would be back at the beginning again. But she was careful, and so was I.
It hadn’t surprised me that Raffaello had moved seats in maths that first week. I was on my own now, looking out of the window, staring so hard at the eucalypts in the playground that they had silvery edges.
I was outside English one afternoon, waiting for the teacher, not even thinking about it, thinking about Jane Eyre and her small, plain self, when Andrew ducked up next to me. He had been trying to catch my attention, I realised. It was another performance: he was singing, and now that I was looking at him, I could see that he was singing ‘Like a Virgin’.
He went on singing, doing little twists in front of me. Other kids were watching us, glad they weren’t the object of Andrew’s attention. I kept still. And the longer I was still, the more it started to look like Andrew was serenading me rather than harassing me, his little dance becoming more and more elaborate. I looked at him, his rodent’s face. I could see his teeth as he sang, and they did not look clean.
It was a decision, a sudden accession to adulthood. It was like when I’d decided not to speak to my father. It was absolute power, if I wanted it. It came like so: I was not going to be a success at this, and so I was going to stop trying. I had found a virtue in stillness, in watching — in ceasing, at least for the moment, to care whether or not I was acceptable to others. In this silence, while Andrew’s dance wound down — you could see him considering how to leave, whether it would be better to spin away from me as though I had never been there or come to a stop in front of me and see what I would do — I realised that it was not just me who was a virgin.
I have looked at a photograph of myself from that time. I see a girl with pale skin and short dark hair, with arms folded over her breasts. I am wearing something else of my father’s, an old painting shirt, and I look pretty, and angry, a lot like my mother. Judy, who is standing next to me, is not so fat as we thought. But we were right about the weight loss, though it was Judy’s own scholarship that took her away, that left her little time or money for food. We are still friends.
We dress as ourselves now. I wear jeans, and T-shirts. Judy is tall and bosomy and recognisable in public. She wears old-fashioned dresses with sculpted bodices, long boots that lace up, and dark glasses if we a
re going out. Judy comes over from the eastern suburbs to sit in a café with me. If my son is on Judy’s lap he will bury his hands in her hair, still streaked with red and gold.
Tales of Action and Adventure
MARK O’FLYNN
We’re throwing a small dinner to welcome my wife’s old friend Russell back from his long trek around the globe. The kids are at a sleepover so we think we might be able to get in some adult conversation for once. I am cooking. Russell Stanley is Shona’s first boyfriend. Someone she has known since high school. His postcards, from various parts of the world, are pinned to the noticeboard beside the fridge. They have arrived with enviable regularity, adorned with vistas of colourful stamps. Grace, our daughter, is too young, or too cool, to be interested in stamps, or her mother’s old boyfriends.
Shona talks about Russell frequently, relating his news about the part of the world from where the latest cards have issued. I can’t keep up. Now that I come to think of it I have never heard Shona say a bad word about Russell. I have heard her say plenty of bad words about other men from her past, but not Russell. It’s almost like she still loves him, but that couldn’t be correct, because that was years ago and she married me, right? Right? I recall her saying that Russell was distantly related to Stanley, intrepid explorer of Stanley and Livingstone fame. That may be true, but the test of a man’s character is relative. We shall see. I have always thought it quaint the way she has managed to maintain friendships from her school days; that sense of shared history. It must be nice. I know no one from my past. They’re all ghosts. The past is a haunted place for me. Shona thinks the most intimate knowledge one can have of another person is if you knew them when they wore braces. Shona has perfect teeth now. I have studied the photos — and there is Russell, at her side, with braces of his own.
I confess a part of me has been a little jealous of Russell. Of his physique. Of his hair. Of how the last seven or eight years, more often than not, he has been travelling overseas. Lucky beggar. I wonder how he has been able to afford it? It can’t have been cheap. Another way of looking at it might be that in the last seven or eight years he has been out of work more often than not. Alternatively, perhaps Shona sees in both of us the same outdoorsy, adventurous type.
I am still setting the table when the doorbell rings. Suddenly I am struck by the banality of the sound. Shona is still getting ready. I open the deadlock. Russell is early. The prodigal boyfriend. There is nothing else for it but to shake his hand.
‘Welcome home.’
‘Home?’ he says, philosophically, considering all the nuances of the word.
‘Come in. Would you like a beer?’
Russell gives a little shrug.
‘No? Wine then? Or juice?’
‘Juice.’
I go into the kitchen, open the fridge, pour a flute of orange juice. The fridge is full of alcohol, but all he wants is juice. When I return, Russell is still standing by the front door.
‘Would you like me to take my shoes off?’
‘No, no. That’s fine. Come in. Make yourself at home.’
Russell wipes his feet, then shuffles in and takes off his coat, which I hang by the tall mirror in the hallway. He still cuts a strapping figure. There, that’s a sentence from a tale of action and adventure. A strapping figure — despite the tinge of salt and pepper at his temples. He stands at the entrance to the dining room and watches me finish setting the table. The doilies in place. The serviettes. I notice that he peers into his orange juice, examining it closely.
A toilet flushes in the distance. In a moment there is a squeal from the far end of the hallway, and I take this to mean that Shona has at last spotted her long-lost friend. She throws herself into his arms, and I find myself counting the seconds of their kiss. She has reverted to a schoolgirl. I think about candles, then dismiss the idea. Candles are too intimate. There are only a few little birthday candles anyway.
I have met Russell before, of course. I could not have married Shona without knowing something of her past dalliances, just as she knows mine. Russell’s name has always cropped up at the most significant moments in her history. I don’t know exactly how I feel about this. Once, before I met her, Russell drove Shona to an abortion clinic. Afterwards he took her home and listened to her sob in the shower and made her a cup of tea even though he was not the father. He came to our wedding, of course, and after our daughter was born a few years later he gradually faded from our lives. Then, when he had disappeared overseas, the postcards began to arrive. I think it is good for a woman to have male friends, friendships of a platonic, non-threatening nature. Friendships that would be perfectly fine for me to have too.
I have mashed an avocado, mixed with garlic and tomatoes to make guacamole. I have crushed chickpeas and garlic to make my own hummus. I have julienned carrots and celery as instruments to dip and dig into these concoctions. Russell looks at them and sighs. He explains that the jet lag is still catching up with him. He hopes he’ll be able to stay awake. Shona seems to find this inordinately funny, and giggles. I pour some wine for Shona and, as he doesn’t appear to be drinking, another juice for Russell, which again he examines with forensic attention. During this momentary silence the whine of a mosquito is clearly audible. Shona flaps her hand. She hates mosquitoes. I don’t mind them because they always bite her and leave me alone. I jump up to put on some music so as to camouflage any future intrusion I fear silence may make into proceedings. Shona apologises for the mosquitoes.
‘That’s all right,’ Russell says, ‘mosquitoes are nothing. In Honduras, near Tegucigalpa, I was bitten by a vampire bat.’
‘A vampire bat?’
‘I was camping in the jungle and there was a hole in my sock. It bit me on the toe. There was blood everywhere.’
‘Weren’t you in a tent?’
‘There was a hole in that too.’
‘Don’t they give you rabies, those things?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘That’s amazing,’ Shona says.
‘Not really. They’re very common.’
He takes a celery stick, digs and dips, and pops it into his mouth.
I say: ‘I hope you don’t mind the garlic in the guacamole then.’
‘No. It’s very nice.’
We listen to the music for a moment.
Ambience.
‘Shona didn’t tell me if you still eat meat or not. We’re having lamb, but there’s plenty of vegetables as well.’
‘Yes, I eat everything,’ Russell says. ‘In fact in Brazil I ate a howler monkey.’
‘A howler monkey?’ Shona is not quite sure if she has heard right.
‘Yes, we were travelling overland from Imperatriz and got disoriented in the jungle. We had no food and after a few days my companion, Jacques, shot a monkey.’
‘Aren’t those things jumping with parasites?’ I ask.
‘Are they? I don’t know.’
‘What happened?’
‘We cooked it first. It was very tough.’
‘Did you get sick?’
‘No. My friend got sick. But I was fine.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He got better.’
I excuse myself. Duty calls. With industrial-strength oven mitts I fetch hot plates out of the oven. I carve the leg. I serve the slivers. I bring out the main course, garnished with rosemary and mint. Pumpkin. Sweet potato. Lots of spuds in a ceramic bowl that Shona made during her pottery phase. A clichéd Australian meal to welcome back the lonely traveller.
‘Careful, the plates are hot.’
Russell chews every mouthful diligently, thoughtfully. I see that candles wouldn’t have been amiss. Something to look at while he is finishing each mouthful. Shona tries to tell him about a holiday we had last Christmas down at Batemans Bay, but there is not much to tell. Grace stubbed her toe so badly the nail turned black and fell off. Framed photos of the happy, sunburned children gaze down from the walls. Russell reports that he was stung b
y a stingray in the waters off the coast of Luzon and spent two weeks in a Philippine hospital with the lepers. He offers to show us the scar, but Shona declines. She is still eating.
I say: ‘I guess you won’t have heard about Steve Irwin then?’
‘No,’ Russell says. ‘Do I know him?’
When he was discharged, Russell continues, he was ordered to rest and recuperate, so he was laid up in a beach resort near Tuguegarao. The ash from a volcano simmering nearby kept falling into his orange juice and the waiter took twenty minutes to bring a fresh one, even though there was no one else staying at the resort. When it arrived it was brought personally by the manager who said that all the waiters had evacuated, and perhaps sir might like to consider evacuating too, but Russell had already paid up front and was determined to get his money’s worth, so he said he would stay put until the volcano erupted if he had to, only it didn’t erupt.
Shona says: ‘Wow.’
Over dessert, peaches and cream, Russell asks about a mutual schoolfriend of his and Shona’s. Shona is sorry to report that the last she heard their friend, whose name I don’t catch, broke his ankle falling off a ladder and was on crutches. Russell tells of how, while riding a motorbike near Cuzco in the Andes, he hit a condor that hadn’t seen him coming, and nearly fell into a ravine.
‘Didn’t it knock you off your bike?’ I ask.
‘Nearly. It broke the mirror and I lost my deposit. I had bruises the size of dinner plates.’
I clear away our dinner plates and, for the moment, am happy to potter about in the kitchen. I put on the kettle and stack up the dishes. We have a dishwasher, but I am thinking perhaps tonight I will do them by hand. I can hear the music perfectly. When I return with the coffee, Russell is telling Shona a story about how he spent six days in a police lock-up in Lushnje in Albania.
‘What did you do to deserve that?’ I ask.
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