Indigo Girls

by Penni Russon

  I heard heavy footsteps behind me crunching the gravel, as if someone was running up the path. I turned around.

  ‘Tilly, I thought that was you,’ Ivan said, panting.

  ‘Yep.’ Well, it was me. What else could I have said?

  ‘I was wondering . . . are you busy?’

  ‘Um, no.’

  ‘Do you want to come for a walk?’

  Okay. Now if a boy asked you to come for a walk at breakfast o’clock, after you died of shock and everything, you’d think he probably meant a stroll down by the beach, a bit of a chat, maybe end up getting a coffee somewhere. Am I right?

  Half an hour later we were rounding the headland at Point Block (isn’t that just the best name? I love a good oxymoron). We hadn’t spoken more than two words because Ivan had exactly two gears: lightspeed and supersonic. I was going to be the first person to die of a brisk walk. I was panting hard and must have been bright red all over (I can’t blush, but I turn into a beetroot when you combine me with exercise – I can’t win.) My hair was sweating.

  ‘Shall we sit down?’ Ivan said, gesturing at a flat rock.

  I have never sat so fast in my life. Hello, rock. I love you, rock.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Ivan asked me, looking at me funny. He perched on the other end. ‘Sorry, I didn’t realise you were struggling. You should have told me to slow down.’

  ‘Couldn’t . . . speak . . .’ I gasped, willing my face to return to its usual freckle-splotch-and-putty colour.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ivan said again, leaning forward and staring intently into his backpack. ‘I’ve got chocolate somewhere. And water.’

  ‘Water first.’ I gulped down half the bottle before accepting some chocolate. The chocolate was hard and sweet in my mouth, like manna from heaven. I sucked on a square while I looked at Ivan rummaging around in his backpack for another water bottle (scared of girl germs, obviously).

  It suddenly occurred to me that I was in the middle of the wilderness with a boy. What was I doing here? Was I completely stark raving? I mean, why had he brought me so far away from humanity?

  ‘I wanted to talk to you, actually,’ Ivan said.

  ‘Mmm?’ I asked, mouth full of chocolate and seized with cold fear that was more about being alone with a boy than about Ivan being a potential sex-crazed, axe-wielding lunatic. Well, for a start, no axe.

  ‘It’s about Zara.’

  Oh.

  ‘Because you’re about the only one of her friends who isn’t a complete loser.’

  Okaaay. Is that one of those back-handed insults? I’m a loser but not a complete loser? So does that mean I’m a failed loser?

  He must have read my facial expression because he said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. But you seem like a together kind of girl . . .’

  I’m pretty sure he meant frumpy. You know, like when teachers call you ‘a sensible girl’ and what they mean is you have no friends and spend all lunchtime volunteering to re-catalogue books in the library.

  ‘. . . and, well, I’m worried about her.’

  ‘You’re worried about Zara?’ I asked, thinking it was probably about time I aimed for a sentence. Spoken out loud. ‘She seems okay to me.’

  ‘She’s so . . . disconnected. There’s something going on with her. I thought maybe –’ Ivan wasn’t looking at me, by the way. He was staring at his hands, at his feet, out at the water, anywhere but at me. ‘I thought maybe she was taking drugs.’

  ‘Are you serious? Zara?’ I said. ‘No way.’

  Look, I live in the inner city. I see drugs around. I have several funny junkies-on-the-street stories. Heaps of the kids at school have tried weed; some smoke it more than others. (Not me. I’m self-righteous, remember? I don’t even drink alcohol. You can’t be the boss if you’ve got spew in your hair, so therefore getting drunk holds little or no appeal to me.) Occasionally someone in the toilets at the school social claims to be selling ecstasy, but it’s nearly always cat worming pills. Some poor sucker dances under the disco ball waving her arms around saying, ‘I can taste the colours.’ Most girls I know can’t afford drugs anyway – do you know how much lattes and magazines and iTunes and prepaid and library fines cost these days? Face it, all our parents are running around wetting their pants that we’re chroming or on ice and some of us are still trying to get up the nerve to ask a boy out. Well, not Zara, obviously. But me, for example.

  Which brings us back to Ivan. Did he really lure me all the way out into the bush to talk about Zara? How disappointing.

  ‘Okay,’ he was saying, ‘maybe it’s not drugs. But something is going on with her. Could you at least . . . keep an eye on her?’

  Was he asking me to spy on her? ‘And report back to you?’

  ‘Oh no, no,’ Ivan said, as if shocked at the thought. ‘You don’t have to do that. I just thought she might be more likely to confide in you. She really likes you, Tilly. She’s a different person in Indigo, with you and Mieke around. The girls she hangs out with at school . . .’ Ivan made a face.

  I was grinning but I tried to turn it into a modest smile. I was flattered that Ivan said Zara liked me so much. I was also flattered by his insinuation that Mieke and I were somehow superior to her other friends.

  And hey, how sweet was Ivan? His concern for Zara was making him look all furrowed, like this old teddy bear I had at home. Some of his fur kept stubbornly going in the wrong direction, no matter how much you stroked him. I wanted to reach out and stroke Ivan, actually. I was suddenly really physically aware of him, sitting there. I mean, here we were, on either end of a broad flat rock, an arm’s length from each other . . . We were quiet for a moment and I thought, maybe this was it. Maybe this was what I’d been waiting for. I had this sudden fantasy of throwing myself at him, mashing my lips against his, his hand clasping the back of my neck, kissing me back harder.

  I was pulled out of my fantasy when Ivan stood up, and I leapt up too, embarrassed that he might have read my thoughts. He stopped to put the water bottles into the backpack and reluctantly I turned to walk back down the path. But Ivan lingered, looking out through the trees. ‘I love it here,’ he said, surprising me.

  I’d been too out of breath to even notice the view when we arrived. I realised you could see all of Indigo Bay on one side and all of Tallow Beach, which is quieter and more sheltered, on the other side. We were high above both, and for a moment it gave me the feeling of being a seagull, about to soar up into the wind. I nearly said that to Ivan, but it seemed kind of dumb so I decided to conserve my energy for the sprint back to the campsite.

  We settled into a pace somewhere between normal and lightspeed, which, compared to the walk up, felt quite leisurely. At least I could think.

  Zara did seem a bit . . . something. Not like she was on drugs – Ivan was way off on that count, I was sure of it. But still, she’d been particularly quiet this year, sort of reserved about her life, maybe a bit on edge. I mean, I had nothing particularly special to report because I’m a big geeky nerd who doesn’t do anything, but usually Zara mentions boyfriends or her friends or parties she’s been to (I know, because I hang vicariously off every word) and she hasn’t done that at all. Yesterday on the way back from the golf club she’d seemed kind of distracted; I thought it was weird at the time. And then the uncharacteristic sleep-in this morning . . . so maybe Ivan did have a real reason to be concerned about Zara. Part of me thrilled at the thought. It felt like I was peering in through a crack in the wardrobe door, into that other world – Zara’s world. I wanted drama. I wanted action. I wanted insight.

  As we walked the steeply sloping path to the beach, I looked down at the top of Ivan’s head. You know phrenology, when people used to read the bumps in the head to determine personality traits? Well, I had a lot of time to read the crown of Ivan’s head. His hair was cropped very short, like a military style haircut. I remember a few years ago, when it was longer, gold, a little bit woolly, with soft curls. I wonder if he cut it short to make
himself look more serious, more adult. He did look serious, all the time. A slight frown always seemed to pucker between his eyebrows. It was kind of sexy, in a brooding, inaccessible way. I couldn’t help comparing Ivan to Sawyer, the cute waiter. There was an openness about Sawyer, a sense that he was up for anything, on the lookout for mischief. It was as if Sawyer was the opposite of Ivan. Who would I choose, if I had a choice? What did I want from a boyfriend? Brooding, intense and serious, or fun and flirty and up for a laugh?

  I sighed. Zara was right. I was Tilly Dove, boy crazy. Crazy being the operative word.

  Chapter Nine

  Zara

  Mum woke me with a cup of coffee and vegemite on toast cut into soldiers, like I was a kid.

  I rubbed my eyes, peering up at her through the mesh of the swag. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past nine.’

  I groaned and tried to bury my head back in my swag. But now that I was awake I could feel the dry heat of the morning sun; my swag was like a sauna. I crawled out and accepted the coffee and toast. I carried them over to the table under the gazebo adjacent to our caravan, an open tent-like thing where we eat all our meals. Mum and Dad have all these complicated systems for camping, basically to fool Mum into thinking she’s not really camping at all.

  ‘I recharged your phone!’ Mum called from the caravan. When I didn’t respond, she brought it out. ‘Don’t you want it? Goodness, I thought you couldn’t live without it.’

  ‘Of course I can live without it,’ I muttered as Mum dropped it into my lap.

  ‘I was only trying to help,’ Mum said. ‘I thought you might be missing your friends.’

  Sometimes I think Mum likes my friends more than I do. She’s always going on about how popular she was. To Mum being popular is the most important thing in the world. More important than the environment or world peace, as if there’s nothing more to life. I mean, nobody wants to be alone. Not at school, anyway. But somehow, as I get older, it seems . . . I don’t know. Like there’s more. Like there should be more.

  I turned my phone on. It was funny how different it felt to me now. Before I always kept my phone on me. It was part of me. I had fuzzy charms that Sooz had given me and this totally cute crocheted cover with seashell buttons – Tang Yi made one for each of us for Christmas last year. I had ringtones I’d downloaded with my friends and photos of us all stored in the memory. Everyone I knew was programmed into my address book. At home my phone was my salvation. It was a tunnel, a telescope, my view to the outside world, my escape, my protection from my worst nightmare: being alone with my family.

  But now it felt like, instead of my way out, it was someone else’s way in.

  There were a few messages from Sooz. She had a habit of SMSing her thought of the minute, for instance: ur totally missing Veronica Mars. Logan is 2 hot. And: tell me not to eat anymore peppermint santas omigosh I’m so addicted.

  The last one ended with cu in Indigo. I still hadn’t returned her last message.

  I don’t even know why I read the other message, because just seeing those words – number withheld – made me feel sick. But somehow I couldn’t stop myself. It said: You know you want it Zara.

  Whatever. Whatever. I deleted it. I deleted Sooz’s messages too and buried my phone deep in my backpack.

  I pulled out shorts and a sports bra. I was stiff from surfing. I’m pretty fit but surfing must use different muscles or something, or maybe I’d worked harder than I thought, struggling against the waves to get back out there, to start again. I walked down to the beach and found a quiet place to do some yoga stretches. I couldn’t focus. I don’t know if it was the text message, but I felt invaded, my skin was crawling, as if I was being watched. I tried to shake it off, but I couldn’t.

  So I ran instead, along the sand, barefoot, right at the water’s edge, the sea refreshingly cold as it lapped at my feet. But I still couldn’t run that grubby little text message away. That’s what made me angry. I’m strong, right? I’m no fighter, but if he was standing right in front of me, I’d punch him, I’d push him down onto the sand, I’d rub his face into it. But how do you fight words?

  I thought back to the night at Kayla’s party, the night Marcus and I broke up. Well, kind of broke up. He’d led me up the stairs to Kayla’s bedroom. We sat on the bed and kissed. Sometimes, when we were alone like that, he got pushy, he was kind of rough. Sometimes if he’d been drinking he’d try to go further, jamming his hands into the waistband of my jeans or sliding it up my top. He said, ‘Other girls do it.’ He was probably right. Part of me thought I should too, get it over with. But I always pulled away.

  Anyway, that night, he wasn’t pushy. He kissed me for a while and I kissed him back. I must have tasted like vodka. He tasted sickeningly sweet, like lawn clippings, and he smelt like smoke. The warm fuzziness of the alcohol was wearing off. I had a headache starting and every time I closed my eyes the room started to spin. I just wanted to lie down and close my eyes. He must have sensed my reluctance because he pulled back and moaned, ‘Oh Zara, what are you doing to me?’

  No, I didn’t want to think about that. Because when I thought about Marcus, I thought about later, about walking in on him with her – and about the look on Marcus’s face, the blank smile, the narrow slitted eyes.

  So as I ran, I thought about Tang Yi instead, how that night we’d danced like we were fourteen again. We were silly and brave, trying out crazy hip-hop steps, doing fake karaoke, pretending we were famous, not caring if anyone was watching. Sooz and Rio joined us, we lined up and did the Bus Stop, and it was like it used to be, before we started having boyfriends or drinking or any of that stuff.

  It was after that night the text messages began.

  I picked up the speed, pushing against the wet sand as I ran.

  I concentrated on my body’s movement, the long, taut muscles in my thighs and the stringy muscles down the back of my calves. I thought about the way the body fits together, all the cogs and joints, the cartilage and ligaments we studied in health class, and how they make our bodies flexible, make it possible to run, dance, surf. I pushed myself harder, feeling the resistance of the sand under my feet. My lungs were bursting, but I knew I could push through it, push through the pain. There was a point I knew I could get myself to, eventually, if I just kept thrashing myself, where I could run forever. The pain dulls into nothing, and the body just seems to propel itself like a gliding bird, like travelling in a car on a rainy day with slow music – inside you feel slow, even though outside the rushing world is nothing but a blur.

  I was almost through the pain when I saw Dad fishing off the rocks. He was looking out at the water. What did he see when he looked at the ocean? Did he see huge and impressive, or blank and empty?

  I lost my stride. My feet staggered to a stop and I leaned forward, panting. Then I turned around and ran back up the beach, away from Dad, trying to leave my memories behind too. When darkness came and Mum and Dad and Ivan were sleeping, I went surfing again.

  As I paddled out, that instinct was there again, telling me to turn back, to stay where it was light and warm and safe. But I pushed it away, literally, pushing the water back with my arms. Last night’s muscles were tight and sore, but they loosened as I swam.

  I got the rhythm of the waves faster this time. I thought about blind people, how their other senses evolve and sharpen to compensate for their lost sight. So as I turned to paddle to the top of the wave, I closed my eyes, so the light wouldn’t take me by surprise, and to remind myself that I needed to do this by feel. The waves on the sandbar were rougher, choppier than the previous night’s and I had trouble staying upright. But finally I caught one and it was a real smooth ride. I crouched down and with my hands touching the board I cut right into it. I opened my eyes. I was in a dark, low tunnel. After the arduous journey out into the water, dragging myself and the board against the current time and time again with every missed wave, the ride itself was bliss. The floodlights from the golf club bounced
around inside, scattering into little pieces of light. Last night I’d felt part of the sea; tonight I was weightless, I was air, I was the tunnel, the darkness that rolled under the wave. I was part of the space between water, part of the nothing, the unknown.

  At the shoreline, in the darkness, Tilly was waiting for me. To be honest she scared the crap out of me. I’d stood up and was hanging onto my board when I saw this figure looming.

  ‘Tilly?’

  As I got closer, I saw her face was tight and grim, staring me down as if she thought I’d gone for good or something, as if she thought I’d gone into the water to drown myself.

  ‘You followed me?’ I said. I felt like a little kid who’d been caught doing something bad. But I was also curious.

  Tilly nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  She looked away. Then met my eyes. ‘I guess I wanted to know where you were going,’ she said, which was an answer and not an answer. Usually Tilly is straight up, you know? Maybe it’s why I like her so much – she’s not into secrets.

  We were both standing ankle deep in the water. My legs were like jelly. Tilly had a sarong wrapped around her shoulders but I could see her giving the occasional shiver.

  But maybe it wasn’t the cold that was making her shiver. She looked like she was going to yell at me for doing something dangerous. But she didn’t. Suddenly she said, all in a rush, not loudly but with urgency, almost painfully, ‘I want to do it too.’ I glanced behind me at the sea when she said it, as if to say, ‘What, this?’ But I knew what she meant, even though I couldn’t believe she was saying it. It was like she knew what it meant to be riding waves under the night sky, like she understood without me even telling her. It was freezing, but I was beyond cold. So was Tilly. She looked past me, out at the black sea. ‘I want to do it,’ she said again. She didn’t even sound like Tilly. She sounded older and . . . hungry.