‘I bet this is how he found her,’ she turns to me and whispers, ‘I bet he just saw her one day and couldn’t help but follow her. I bet it was love at first sight.’
We follow her. We follow her from the bathroom to Books-Books-Books where she wanders through the aisles, running her fingertips across the spines like they’re harp strings. We peek at her from behind open magazines like we are movie spies. We follow her into the fancy perfume section of the chemist, where all the jewelled bottles have one-word names: Escape, Seduction, Heat, Romance, Obsessed. We follow her into Woolies and watch as she chooses fancy cheeses and a bag of red apples, glossy as lipstick. We follow her out and down into the underground car park until we have her alone. Our sneakers squeak; our stifled laughter spills. She never notices us.
‘See how easy it would be?’ Megan asks, as we watch her drive away.
The second girl is taken on the day that would have been my parents’ seventeenth wedding anniversary. Her name is Kimberly Watson. Mum is driving us back from the video store when the news comes on the radio. We learn that Kimberly Watson was twenty-two – an aspiring actress who was last seen outside a bar called Club Exotique, hopping into a taxi.
‘Bloody stupid girl,’ Mum says. She changes the station as we wait at the lights.
Now it is Kimberly Watson’s face all over the telly. Her first photo is a close-up in black and white. She’s staring into the camera with a smile that’s pulled tight as a mousetrap; eyelids dark and smudged like she is sliding out of focus.
‘I don’t like that photo,’ I say. ‘She’s trying too hard.’
‘It’s not a photo, it’s a headshot, dumb arse,’ Megan says. She knows about these kinds of things.
Mr Henderson says that only sluts get into the kind of trouble Kimberly Watson has clearly gotten herself into.
‘What kind of trouble is that?’ I ask him.
‘Slut trouble, Laura, slut trouble.’
I ask my mum about slut trouble, and she suggests that movie nights should be at our place from now on.
After Kimberly Watson, the summer becomes claustrophobic. Megan and I aren’t allowed to go anywhere on our own, not even down to the park, or the deli at the corner – definitely not to the beach. Mr Henderson spends a whole weekend building a gate into the fence between our houses so that we don’t have to walk out onto the street to see each other. Megan and I beg our parents to be allowed to sleep in the tent at night. It’s sticky and hot under our blanket’s blue roof, but late in the evening the smothering air starts to stir as the sea breeze comes in, and the tent sucks the air in and out like it is breathing. We sleep deeply and wake with the sun, our hair snarled with bottlebrush spikes and the thin sharp leaves from the peppermint tree.
Kimberly Watson’s family doesn’t cry. Her father clenches his jaw so tight you can almost hear his teeth squeak. Her mother stares off to the side of the room, but her eyes don’t catch on anything. She reminds me of one of those fish you can buy propped up on the slush behind the meat counter. Kimberly’s twin brother reads a statement. You can see the echo of Kimberly in his face, but in him it’s more handsome.
‘I’d fuck him,’ I say, but Megan pretends not to notice.
‘She deserves whatever she gets,’ Megan says.
I’m not sure exactly how the game starts, but Megan is in charge. We play it in the tent, at night once my mum turns the house lights off. Megan is Julie-Anne and I am him. To get into character, Megan coils her limp rope of hair under a black wig from an old witch costume and wears her flannel shirt. I wear a brown suit jacket that smells of Mr Henderson – wet leather, dried leaves, smoke.
We stand together in the tent and I say: ‘You are the most beautiful creature I have ever seen, Julie-Anne Marks. I love you, and I must have you,’ and press a chloroformed handkerchief to her mouth (it’s a tea towel sprayed with some of my mum’s drugstore perfume). Megan swoons to the mattress.
The rules are simple: he can do whatever he likes to her. If she moves, she loses. If Megan laughs or squirms or opens her eyes, the game is over and we start again, but this time she is him and I am Kimberly Watson. I am not allowed to be Julie-Anne. There is no point in arguing.
When I am Kimberly, I wear one of the dresses that Megan’s mum left behind – an itchy black thing with massive shoulder pads and two rows of gold buttons down the front the size of honky nuts. When I am Kimberly all he says is: ‘Slut.’ I do not swoon. I am pushed.
At first it is easy to win. We tickle, stick tongues in ears and fingers up noses, whisper the grossest words we know (booger, fanny, sperm, tampon, fallopian) and that’s all it takes before we are both lost – curled up together on the mattress, our laughter loud and loose. Titus complains from behind the fence. Our stomachs ache from holding the laughter in. But on the third night the words aren’t funny anymore. We are no longer ticklish.
I am him, and Megan can’t, won’t be stirred. She is lying on her back with her arms up above her head. In the moon-dark the wig looks like her real hair. Her head is tilted back, her eyes are closed and in that moment, I can see her – I can see Julie-Anne. Perfect, beautiful Julie-Anne in Megan’s mean little face. I hate her. I fucking hate her. I stand over her and stomp one foot down onto her belly fast and hard. Catch the sharp, lurking edge of her hip against the heel of my foot. She makes a strange, animal noise and curls onto her side away from me.
‘I beat you,’ I say, ‘you lose.’ She refuses to speak, but stands, pulls off the wig and shakes out her hair. I unbutton the jacket. It is my turn.
I am ready for her to hurt me.
‘Slut.’
She pushes me to the mattress and sits on my stomach. She moves heavily – drives the air out of me. The dress buttons press against my ribs. I feel her weight shift and she slaps me hard. I keep my eyes closed. Say nothing. I can feel her body tightening and I know she is going to slap me again. It hurts less the second time.
She slides herself down so she is pinning my knees and leans over me. Her hair falls across my eyelids. I can almost taste her strawberry shampoo. I can feel her undoing the giant buttons of Lisa’s dress and opening it up, and then the smaller buttons of my nightie, too. The tent fills with the new sour-milk smell of my sweat. There is only dark against my skin – the dark and her heavy eyes. It’s not cold, but my skin bucks and prickles as she runs her fingertips in slow loops down over my face and throat and nipples and ribs, and then up again and deep into my hair. Again, again, but this time she drags her bitten nails down my belly and hooks her fingers into the waistband of my knickers. I wait. She snaps the elastic. Once. Twice.
‘You reek,’ she spits at me, as she pushes herself up and leaves the tent.
I know this is a test. And so I wait. I hear the gate in the fence thump open, and the back door of the Henderson house. I wait.
There is ocean in the air now – the night is chilling and I’m pressing myself tight into the mattress to hold the shiver. I am waiting. I listen to the cicadas and the crickets, the garden’s insect heartbeat. Everything seems louder, the smell of the chloroformed rag, the sheep-stink of the wool, the crushed leaves of the peppermint tree. I am waiting for him. And I know now with a cold and magnificent certainty that even after this game is over a part of me will always be waiting.
Help Me Harden My Heart
Dominic Amerena
I’m scrubbing the word SCUM off the front door of our house. I wipe so hard that my wrists start to ache, but the red letters remain bold and bright, their edges dripping as if they’re bleeding.
The whipbirds are going mad in the fig tree by the fence, the way they always do before a storm. I turn and look at the dark clouds collecting over the buildings in the CBD. We live on the court up the top of Mount Coot-tha. Our view stretches all the way down through Toowong to the big bend in the Brisbane River, dishwater grey in the gathering gloom.
Inside people are moving around, slamming cupboard doors. I can hear their muffled voices in the livi
ng room. I lean my forehead against the door, against the red, dripping letters. The fumes from the turps are making me light-headed. I stay very still and I breathe deeply, again and again, trying to stop myself remembering.
Last night I was standing by our bedroom window, watching the Christmas lights on our neighbour’s roof. I heard Karl sit up in bed and start to sob. Eventually he swung his legs over the side of the bed and tried to stand, but he’d forgotten about his broken foot and crumpled facedown on the carpet. He lay still. I thought he’d passed out, but when I crouched down beside him and ran my fingers through his hair I could hear him making this wet, barely there sound, a kind of whimpering, as though his lungs were full of water.
Once I’d gotten him back in bed I tried to feed him the sleeping pills Dr Joyce had prescribed, but he kept coughing them back up. Eventually I crushed the tablets into a longneck and fed it to him in sips between his sobs, the same way I used to feed Seth his formula when he was a toddler.
I’d finally got Karl down when I heard a car pull up out the front of the house. The sound of doors slamming and an engine ticking over. I heard the creak of our front gate and their boots on the path. Their voices were thick with drink as they walked along the verandah. I listened to a can rattling and the paint being sprayed across the door.
I was going to make a dash for the phone in the hallway to call the police, but I just stood there frozen, waiting for them to come through the front door and do whatever they’d come here to do. Looking back on it, I was almost thankful for the fear, I was thankful to not be thinking about him for a few moments. They finished spraying and I heard the sound of their piss hissing on the welcome mat, their voices fading into the night.
*
I must have got turps in my eyes, because they’re burning. I blink furiously and dab at them with the sleeve of my shirt, fumble the front door open and rush down the hall, making sure not to look into the living room. I make it to the bathroom, turn the sink’s taps on full. It’s only when the water hits my face that I realise I’m just crying again.
The mirror’s still flecked with toothpaste. Seth would always make a terrible mess when he cleaned his teeth. He brushed with incredible force, flicking toothpaste all over the sink and the mirror, the bathroom tiles. He brushed like he was trying to hurt himself, like he was trying to destroy something. The mess he made used to drive me mad, but since he left I haven’t been able to bring myself to clean it.
‘Mrs Kenny.’ It’s one of the agent’s voices, coming from the doorway. I try to block him out, to concentrate on my reflection in the mirror. I notice the search warrant balled in the front pocket of my shirt.
‘Mrs Kenny?’ He says my name like it hurts. ‘We need you.’
I follow him down the hallway towards the living room. His suit’s too hot for the weather and continents of sweat are spreading out from his armpits, from the small of his back.
My son’s teeth are spread out across our coffee table. The agent with the front rower’s neck is sitting on our couch taking photos with one of those big crime scene cameras that you see on the telly. Even though some of them have been sitting there for a decade or so, the teeth are still white, like life hasn’t got to them yet.
‘We’re taking these,’ he says, counting them into an evidence bag. ‘They will be used as evidence —’
‘Can I keep one?’ I say, in a strange, tiny voice.
‘Once the body has been identified the teeth will be returned to you.’
‘One. I only want one. Please let me keep one.’
I’m still saying please, as they usher me over to the couch, shove a glass of water into my hand. They confer in low voices by the living room door, and then one of them approaches me with the evidence bag, holds it open before me like a lucky dip.
‘Just one.’ He gives me a tight-lipped, toothless smile. His partner rams his phone to his ear, walks out the front door.
I put my hand in the bag, run my fingers through his teeth, those brittle little memories. The tooth I choose is an incisor, fine and long, with a pointed tip. I slip it into my bra.
The agent is looking at me like I’ve gone mad as he takes the evidence bag off me. I follow him to the front door. He tells me to expect a call as soon as the remains have been analysed. He tells me that I should know by tonight. Through our bedroom door Karl’s snoring is like water going down a drain. As the agent talks I nod, all the while looking at the words JIHAD SCUM scrawled across our front door.
*
I’m lying on my side on the living room rug, switching telly stations whenever a news bulletin comes on. Time has operated strangely since Seth left. Sometimes it feels like every second’s being seared into me. Other times whole days will pass without me even noticing. I’ll be sitting at the kitchen table and the light will change outside and I’ll realise that I’ve been there for hours.
The phone rings. I urge myself to pick up, to get it over with, but it clicks over to the answering machine, and there’s Audrey’s voice saying that she’s at the supermarket on her way home from work and asking what groceries I need.
The old recording was Seth saying: ‘We might be in, we might be out, but leave a message and you’ll find out!’ We recorded it when he was just starting Year Nine. Karl was still working in the mines outside Mount Isa, and Seth and I were alone in the house. I wrote the message out for him and begged him to read it into the machine. I suppose I wanted us to sound like a happy family. He read it in his soft, stumbling voice, often pausing between the words. It sounded like he was apologising for something he’d done wrong.
Karl and I erased the message after they started playing it on the news, trying to match it to the hooded figure’s voice on the videos. By that stage Seth had been gone for a week and we already knew he wasn’t coming home.
The press had got hold of the blog he put online after he made it to Syria. They were already coming up with nicknames for him: The Tropical Terrorist. Sicko Seth. The police had taken Seth’s computer, but we managed to get the blog up on the iPad. We read it sitting on the side of the bed, our backs to the window, trying to ignore the journalists milling about in the front yard.
It was full of isms. Terrorism and patriotism and atheism and capitalism. It was full of threats against the kids and teachers at his school. But there were Seth’s spelling errors too, his childlike turns of phrase. He called those hooded men in the desert his best mates, he called them cool and awesome. He said they were the only ones who ‘know what I’m about’.
Last year Seth would sit with us while we were watching the news. When a report came on showing those men firing guns into the air, he’d say things like, ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’ or ‘The government is trying to pull the wool over our eyes’. He’d say the words tentatively, like he was feeling how they sounded coming out of his mouth. He’d look at me while he spoke, to see if I was reacting. We thought it was just stuff he’d picked up in Media Studies. We were just glad he was showing an interest. We suggested journalism courses for him to study at uni, once he’d finished school.
When I saw the videos on the news, I knew it was him of course. I recognised his voice immediately: the stuttered starts of his sentences, the way he softened his r’s into w’s. Rhotacism, the speech pathologist called it. Rhotacism, expressive language disorder, anhedonic tendencies. Since Seth was born, Karl and I have become fluent in the language of dysfunction, all those long, cold words trying to classify his sadness.
He was a quiet child, turned in on himself. He went around with a permanently pained expression, as if he was missing a layer of skin. We sent him to counsellors for a while, but none of them seemed to make him any better.
Once Karl got laid off from his job in the mines, we couldn’t afford the therapy. ‘He’s just a late bloomer,’ Karl said. ‘This is probably the best thing for him. He’ll be fine.’
The storm’s mucking with the signal of the TV now, and the screen’s showing
a scrambled image from a vacuum cleaner ad with the slogan, ‘For When Life Sucks’. Seth used to help me get the TV working. He was always good with electronics, things with screens and buttons, things he didn’t have to talk to. Sometimes I’d put all the cables in the wrong sockets at the back of the settop box, just so I had an excuse to speak with him.
I go into the bedroom to check on Karl. He’s on his back, staring up at the ceiling with the half-drunk longneck beside the bed. He looks ridiculous with his whippet chest, the big, clunky moon boot. Karl’s always been a runner, but after Seth left, that’s all he did. He’d run down from Chapel Hill across the river and all the way out to Oxley. He’d run through the night, out to Brisbane’s city limits and back, until he got stress fractures in his foot. They got so bad that he couldn’t even stand up. While he ran I cleaned until the house smelt like bleach, like nothing, everywhere except Seth’s room.
‘Are you feeling any better?’ I kneel beside him. He just snorts and shuffles onto his side, reaches for the beer. He winces as he takes a sip.
‘How much longer are you going to do this for?’ I ask, taking the bottle from him. ‘You have to get out of bed eventually.’
‘I know.’ He looks up at me and for a few seconds I see the old Karl, the Karl with that full, thrilling laugh and a smile like a lit bulb; the Karl who wouldn’t try to drink himself through this.
‘Were there people here before?’ he asks.
I want to show him the tooth, tell him that it’s finally over, but instead I just kiss him on the head and hand him back the bottle.
‘Don’t worry about it, love. It was just more journalists asking about Seth.’ He drains the rest of the beer, closes his eyes. By the time I reach the bedroom door it seems like he’s already asleep.
*
Seth was an accident. Everyone else called him a miracle. He was born just before my forty-fifth birthday, though Karl and I had stopped trying to conceive years before that. I had restricted fallopian tubes, what one specialist referred to as lazy tubes. We used to joke that they were Catholic tubes, that God tied them in punishment for never tying the knot with Karl. Money was too tight for IVF and Karl didn’t want to raise someone else’s child, so adoption was out. We decided to make do and get on with our lives. When I stopped getting my period I thought that menopause had started early, but then I couldn’t fit into my work uniform and I started craving bacon at all hours of the night.
The Best Australian Stories 2017 Page 8