Jamie tried to say something to me but it was impossible to hear over the clamour of mirth that he had aroused. He was still struggling to contain his own laughter, trying to be serious. I felt sure he had recognised the devastation on my face and was going to apologise. He had reached the edge of the veranda. He leant on it with his elbows, as if he needed the support, as if he was drunk. He looked at me and beckoned me to him. This wasn’t the Jamie I knew and worshipped. Strangled by the shadows, his face seemed twisted and brutal, with this leering, mocking grin that I had never witnessed before. Still, he beckoned me to him. After so many weeks of what seemed like estrangement, finally he wanted me again. I crawled towards him, until our faces were only inches apart.
‘Don’t stop,’ he whispered hoarsely and his voice gave out into a sneering laugh.
Then his voice dropped lower still and he said the words so that no one else could hear. ‘I never realised what a perfect little poofter you are.’
I was stung. I sprang back from him, the words searing into me like a brand on my flesh. Jamie stood there, staring at me, as if I was some strange species, like something that the Robinson family might encounter in outer space.
Which I wasn’t, I wasn’t.
All I’d wanted was to look beautiful. Like Belinda. I remembered how Babe and Lou had looked at me, just before we were about to begin the show, with such a grave awe in their eyes. I felt transformed. That night I would be Belinda Pepper. A fierce beauty.
I sprang to my feet, commanding attention, fighting back the tears that threatened to undo me. I sprang onto the table, which had been too heavy to move off the stage, resuming the performance once more. I stood upon high, my mane of hair dangling in my face, my eyes gleaming with a menace of my own. Now I was the crone that Aunt Evelyn so often delighted in scaring us children with. I was a witch from Macbeth. I was Abigail from The Crucible. I was revealing the unknown, accusing the unwary. I pointed my finger at Jamie as if I was inviting him to a duel and began to gabble out the words as if they were a spell.
‘He gave it to Belinda. He gave her the marijuana. He was growing it over in the old toilet at the woolshed. He gave it to Belinda. It was him. It was him.’
I crumpled to the floor, the spirit that had taken possession of me spent. The accusation had been thrown out and like magic it went to work.
7
Chapter 7
The following day was Christmas. It dawned with little prospect of joy for me. I was obliged to get up at five thirty in the morning and help my father bale the hay in the lucerne paddock. I stacked the bales into pyramids on the hay sledge while he drove the tractor. I resented every bale I wedged into place. My pyramids were short-lived. Inevitably they collapsed in a heap when I dispatched them off the sledge onto the cropped grass. I cheered to myself every time that happened. I was in a destructive mood. I watched the machinery swallow up the hay and contemplated throwing myself in after it. An agonising death. I would be gouged and pummelled to shreds. Yet the bloody spectacle of such an act seemed preferable to the silent, secret suffering of first love.
Lost love.
My father had put me in the tractor cab initially and stooked the hay himself. But my driving had been so erratic he made me get out and stook. ‘It takes precision driving,’ he said curtly, relieving me of the task.
I was too preoccupied. I failed to notice when I veered off-course and missed great rows of hay. I didn’t hear my father’s frantic yelling to get back in line. He had to jump off the sledge and run ahead, waving his arms to make me stop. I almost ran him over before I noticed him. My thoughts were elsewhere.
Relegated to the sledge, I had no time for daydreaming. The bales kept coming relentlessly, demanding my attention as they pumped out of the baler, threatening to knock me off the sledge if I ignored them. I longed for the string to run out or a shear-pin to snap so that we could stop, but for once the machinery worked efficiently. Usually, there was some breakdown, which drew everything out for hours longer than necessary. But not that day. That day, everything worked exactly, coldly, grimly.
Hay dust rose in the air and fell all about me. Great billowing clouds, stirred up by the fury of the machine. The dust was ubiquitous, irritating. It insinuated its way everywhere. It clogged my nostrils, caked my tongue, coated my glasses, then found its way beneath the lenses as well to nag at my eyes directly. It stuck thickly to the sweat on my face like ruined make-up. Bits of hay adorned my hair, lodged themselves down my gumboots, beneath my clothes. I took a piss and found a nest of straw in my underwear.
Once there had been a time when the flurry of dust and straw had seemed a frivolous thing. Jamie and I had tossed our heads back and laughed into it till we choked. It was confetti and I was his bride, grubby but smug. We worked the sledge side by side, taking a bale in turn, me struggling with the top one but determined to prove to him that I was his equal. He threw his shirt off and surrendered himself to the dust. ‘It gets in anyway,’ he laughed.
I studied him discreetly as we worked. We were too busy for him to notice my stares. Occasionally I brushed against him. Felt the graze of my skin upon his. Not often, not so that he would notice. Just fleeting moments. Brief shivers of sensation. If we turned a corner sharply I’d touch him as if to steady myself. The seemingly accidental was ardently calculated.
Once the glaze of his sweat wiped upon my arm and I licked it, tasted the salt of him on my tongue. I didn’t want to speak after that and risk losing the tang of him. I lolled it round in my mouth while Jamie tried to joke me out of what he took to be a sulky mood.
Stooking the bales alone on Christmas morning was a cruel reminder of my loss. Jamie was gone.
I hadn’t been able to sleep after the concert. We were all sent to bed in disgrace. I lay there listening to our parents discuss the situation, though Aunt Evelyn was the only one who spoke loudly enough for me to hear. ‘I wanted to get up on that stage and close the show down,’ she said at one point. ‘I wanted to. But I couldn’t. I was mesmerised by the sheer horror of it. I couldn’t move a muscle.’
Finally, Uncle Arthur quietened Aunt Evelyn down and they drove home. My parents went to bed. Everything was silent. Except in my head. Tumult reigned there. What Jamie had said pounded at me again and again like relentless hay bales out of the machine. His words provoked so many questions and anxieties, but my overriding concern was the fear that I had alienated him forever.
Suddenly, I heard the garage doors creak open. I bounded out of bed. I knew who it had to be and what it must mean. Torn between the need for silence and for speed, I ran on tiptoes to the back door. It was often left open on summer nights to cool the house. I stood there in the doorway, hidden amongst the dangling plastic frenzy of the fly-screen and watched Jamie pack his belongings into the boot of his car. When he’d finished, he disappeared into the garage. A tear began to slide down my cheek as I waited for the engine to start. Another tear fell and still there was no sound. I listened closely. I could hear a grunt and then another grunt. Slowly, I crept forward, down the path, ready to scuttle back inside if he should suddenly appear.
As I got closer to the garage, I realised what he was doing. He didn’t want to start the engine and wake my father. Risk him storming down after him and making a scene. He knew all too well the sensitivity of my father’s hearing. He was trying to push the car out of the garage so he could glide it silently down the driveway. But he couldn’t heave it out of the garage.
I was debating whether I dared to sneak a look round the corner, when suddenly he loomed in front of me. We both gasped in surprise. I stood there, ashamed, not daring to look at him. I began to shiver in my pyjamas, not from the cold, but from the dread of what he might say to me. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he finally asked.
The lie came to me easily. ‘I came to give you a push.’
Jamie just grunted. He didn’t even say thanks but turned back into the garage. ‘Come on then,’ he called impatiently from the depths of
the garage.
I walked round the other side of the car and edged my way to the end of the garage. Jamie was already braced against the car waiting for me.
‘Okay, heave ho,’ he said.
I crouched and began to push. Slowly, the car began to inch backward. I pushed as hard as I could. I wanted to impress him this one last time. Though another part of me desperately wanted to apply the handbrake and beg him not to go. We cleared the garage and Jamie dashed forward and leapt into the driver’s seat. He began to swing the car round so that he was facing down the driveway. I stopped pushing. Watched the car glide away from me. Jamie clambered out and began to push the car forward to get some momentum going, ready to jump back in at the last minute. I didn’t move to help. I willed him to mistime things and leave it too late, so that his car sailed off down the hill without him and crashed. He wouldn’t be able to go anywhere then.
But he timed it perfectly. He jumped into the front seat and slammed the door. He was leaving without a goodbye. Without a wave or even a word of thanks for giving him a push. I couldn’t believe it. Instinctively, I began to run after him. The car had just begun to amble away and it was easy to catch up with him. His window was wound down. He looked round in annoyed surprise at me running alongside his car. I knew I must look a fright. Panting, desperate, tearful. ‘What?’ he asked testily.
Confronted by that impatient, aggressive look on his face, I was forced to acknowledge any hopes of him staying were doomed. There was nothing that could be said between us now except perhaps goodbye. Unless …
Suddenly, I knew what I had to say. Rather, what I had to ask. The enigma that had been puzzling me for months had finally poised itself on my tongue as a question. Jamie was leaving. I could ask him and it wouldn’t matter so much what he thought of me. The car was moving faster and faster. I was breathless. I began to speak, but abruptly my nerve deserted me and all that came out was a sort of strangled moan. Jamie’s expression became alarmed, a flicker of abhorrence in his face. He wanted to escape me. I knew what he was thinking. That my moan was a prelude to a declaration of passion. His fingers moved to the ignition keys. I knew it was my last chance and I snatched it.
‘What’s a poofter?’ I asked quickly, recklessly.
His hand dropped into his lap. He stared up at me incredulously. ‘What?’
I wanted to cringe, to cry, to disown the question. Yet at the same time that my doubts began to surface, I noticed a change in Jamie. Surprise had melted some of the grimness out of his face, leaving a vulnerability, a confused boyishness. The ghost of his jovial old self hovered there in his face. I felt a brief fierce flare of encouragement. I began to speak, my words an incoherent jumble. ‘I don’t know what it is. Whether I want to be one. It’s a word that isn’t in the dictionary. You said I was one and … and … I just don’t understand.’
I couldn’t say any more. I ran out of breath. All I could do was nod encouragingly at him, my eyes entreating. We were halfway down the drive, the car was moving faster and I was beginning to lag behind. Jamie turned away, bent himself over the wheel so I couldn’t see his face. lt was only then as despair set in that I noticed the pain in my bare feet. I was running on the gravel and suddenly every step was etched with pain. I was about to concede that I could no longer keep up with the car, when he gave a sigh and turned to face me.
‘It’s a homo. You know what that is?’
I winced and nodded. Jamie turned the ignition key. The motor began to hum. We were at the bottom of the driveway. Jamie jerked the car into gear. ‘See ya,’ he said, then his car jolted forward kicking up dust.
It was wrong to seize upon his words and cling to them as if they were an eternal promise. But I was so stricken with grief at his going, so wild with love for him, I couldn’t help myself. ‘I hope so,’ I called after him and my eyes and nostrils and mouth instantly filled with dust.
It choked me. I bent over, coughing and wheezing and spitting until the taste of it was almost gone. It was a sign. I knew it. I should never have given voice to my hopes. When I’d recovered and could look up, the headlights of Jamie’s car were far away. I watched them until they were lost from view altogether. See ya he’d said but his words were nothing more than convention. I knew I would never see him again. Ever. I began to limp back up to the house.
I went to my bedroom but I didn’t go back to bed. Instead I pulled the cow’s tail out of the drawer. I took it outside, holding it in front of me, pinched between two fingers, as if it smelt offensively. I tossed it into the incinerator where we burnt the rubbish. It gleamed whiter than ever against the black ashes. I had brought matches but suddenly I doubted that it would burn on its own. I would have to get a blaze going.
I ran back to my room. I knew what I would use to fuel the fire. I ripped down the poster of David Cassidy with his shirt off. It wasn’t the sort of thing a normal boy had hanging in his bedroom. I couldn’t believe that had never occurred to me before. It was best to burn it. I was about to leave the room when I remembered something else which should be burnt for the same reasons, a photograph I had kept hidden in my drawer with the cow tail.
I was glad it was dark. It meant I couldn’t have a last look at it and lose my resolve. I took it outside with the poster. I screwed the poster up and threw it in after the cow’s tail. Then I lit a match, picked up the photograph and held it to the tiny flame. The flame flickered and caught, illuminating the image as it began to consume it. The photograph was of Jamie. The one that I’d rescued from the rubbish bin in his hut and stuck back together with sellotape. Not that anyone would recognise it as Jamie. There was a piece missing. A vital piece. He had no face. Like one of those ancient Greek statues, the head lost somewhere through the centuries. I had mourned the absence of the face but now I was relieved. If it had been whole I doubted that I would’ve been able to burn it. The heat worried my fingers and I let go of the corner I was holding instinctively. It fell into the incinerator, the flame engulfing the entire photograph as it dropped from sight. Within a few moments, the poster had burst into a dancing blaze. I watched the fire until it died away and then crept back to the house, to my bed.
It was an odd coincidence to awaken the next morning to my father calling Jamie. I had been dreaming of him. I knew it as soon as I opened my eyes. I was annoyed to have had the dream interrupted by my father’s unwelcome noise and as my irritation mounted, I suddenly realised I had lost it. The dream. It had been there just a moment before, hovering in my consciousness, waiting for me to drift back into it. But when my attention had been distracted, it had stolen away. All that lingered was the sense that it had centred upon Jamie and something significant had been about to occur between the two of us. I closed my eyes and strained to recapture the image, to lull it back. It was impossible. Outside my father’s tone became terser as the prospect of having to walk over to the hut and rouse Jamie out of bed grew more inevitable. Then I remembered. Jamie was gone and with that realisation came a sharp stab of sorrow. I sank back into my pillows.
Gradually that aching sense of loss gave way to another emotion: indignation, and a conviction that I had been cheated. I had burnt my prized possessions as an act of redemption. Purged my poofter trappings, expecting my inclinations to have been destroyed along with them. But they hadn’t been. My desires lived on in my dreams, betraying my new intentions. My sacrifice had been for nothing. I was still a poofter. I still loved Jamie. Only now I no longer had a photograph of him.
When my father returned from the hut, he was cursing Jamie and wishing an agonising fate upon him. He burst into my bedroom and ordered me out of bed. ‘That long-haired git has snuck off in the night. I can’t believe I didn’t hear him. You’ll have to help me with the hay. The forecast’s for rain. Can you believe it? There’s a drought, but it’s going to rain today just when my hay’s ready. No time to waste. Rattle your dags.’
It was five thirty on Christmas Day, and I had to make hay.
Lou turned up roun
d breakfast time to relieve my father of the driving so he could go and eat. As soon as he’d taken off in the ute, Lou stopped the tractor, jumped from the cab and walked grimly back towards me. She knew Jamie was gone. I could tell. Her face was quivering with emotion. She opened her mouth to speak but the words failed to come. All the accusations she planned to fling at me, that simmered in her breast, clogged in her throat. She burst into tears.
I was stunned. Lou prided herself on never crying. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried, it had been so long ago. Her tears were turbulent but quick. Merely a prelude to the full fury of her anger. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, sniffed and then pulled me off the hay sledge, pummelling me to the ground. ‘Treachery,’ she shrieked in my face. ‘You’ve ruined everything.’
She pinned me to the ground, her knees wedged against my arms. ‘We had plans for next year, me and Jamie. Just the two of us. He was gunna let me use his gun. We were gunna go rabbit shooting together. He was gunna let me drive his car. He said I could be his adopted kid brother.’
Treachery? I couldn’t believe she accused me of what she was guilty of herself. It was she who had betrayed me. Plotted secretly behind my back. Made marvellous plans with Jamie for the things they would do together when I was away at boarding school. She must have been counting down the days for me to leave. It almost pained me as much as the loss of Jamie. That Lou had behaved with such calculated disloyalty.
I was pleased to have unwittingly ruined her plans. Perhaps she saw that in my face, for her eyes narrowed in that shrewd, knowing way of hers. For a few moments, we simply stared at one another, the sudden rush of mutual hatred wavering against the weight of the companionable intimacy we’d known together for so long. Suddenly, she sprang off me and stalked back to the tractor.
50 Ways of Saying Fabulous Book 2 Anniversary Edition Page 10