Wildlife

by Fiona Wood

  wednesday 24 october

  So Michael told me something.

  I like the way he works. No getting to know you, no graded intimacy or social niceties, no worry about, Does she like me? Are we friends now? More like: 1. trust, 2. full disclosure.

  He loves Sibylla. Not in a teen crush way. He loves her in a soul mate/destiny way. She just hasn’t cottoned on to the destiny thing yet. That is how he sees it, anyway.

  Sibylla does not love Michael. She likes him. She gets him. She even values him, but she doesn’t love him. I think he is heading for pain, but he takes the long view. He believes that they will be together one day. He cannot imagine a world in which that won’t eventually happen. It is appealing that Mr. Implacable Logic has a blind spot.

  He is so lovely. He’s not jealous that Sibylla is with Ben. He’s worried. Because he doesn’t think Ben is sufficient in any way for Sibylla. Not good enough.

  Sibylla is besotted with Ben. She also gets him. And that makes her cautious. Caution means she is holding something back. And Ben still finds that intriguing, but there are so many girls here who would hold nothing back that I wonder how long intriguing will hold up.

  Michael has known Sibylla since the kindergarten era. He invented Sibylla tablets around this time. One (shiny, magical) strand of Sibylla’s hair, twisted and rolled until it is a tiny little nuggety ball, swallowed when one is feeling anxious or unhappy. Will alleviate said feeling.

  Crazy, hey? But it worked. He says it has given him complete faith in the placebo effect.

  He is worried now because he’s aware that he is becoming overly preoccupied with Sibylla. He’s been there before.

  How lucky is he that I am his new friend? I told him to write it all out in a letter to Sibylla: the letter you never send. All that therapy, ready to be regurgitated at will. I have a catalogue of strategies as long as my arm, longer than my patience.

  He’s going to give it a shot. His only worry is will one letter suffice? He thinks it might require a few volumes.

  Holly and Eliza and I arrive a bit later than everyone else, because Holly forgot to bag some grass clippings for Grounds, so we got slammed with Sevens as punishment, an extra house weeding job.

  I wish I’d trusted my instincts. I look around. It’s the crème de la crème of my least favorite people. Except for Ben, who I can’t see.

  And they’re all in party mode. Holly is immediately on the prowl for weed so she can catch up. Eliza is getting into her running skins and shoes the minute we arrive, itching to dash off.

  Unfortunately, Ben “my body is a temple” appears to be as much out of it as everyone else. He lifts a languid arm as I approach, but I don’t really feel like joining the girl queue surrounding him.

  The flat in Snow Gum Flat refers to the grassy area next to the river.

  I decide to play mother and pitch our tent. Holly and I are in a two-person tent, and Eliza has brought a one-person tent, because she will be spending the whole time sprinting around like a maniac. Like me, she won’t do any drugs, and she’ll be in bed early and up early. She is so self-sufficient. I asked her this morning while we were yanking out weeds if there is any boy she likes. She said, “Boys are idiots. I’m going to wait till they turn into men, and have another look then.”

  The river here is a swimming hole, quiet and dark. Mountains slip their shadows deep into the water. Farther downstream, the water spreads out over rocks, shallow, loud, and racy. Old gum trees crowd the edge. Maybe, just maybe, at the height of summer, on the tenth consecutive heat-wave day, you’d be tempted to swim. The water temperature would still be melted ice cube.

  Smooth pebbles every shade of gray, from nearly white to nearly black, and pink and yellow run their muted rainbow down to the water. When the rock grinds into coarse clean riverbed sand, it is the color of brown sugar. Standing at the edge, looking down, it’s hard to see exactly where the water begins.

  About sixty feet farther along the river’s edge, there’s a bloody mess sending swiveling threads of red into the water. A small pile of trout guts someone couldn’t be bothered to clean up.

  I get my trowel and start digging. I can’t see anyone else here bothering, and the job isn’t going to smell any better in the morning.

  Holly comes over with the smallest joint I’ve ever seen, acting like she’s stoned and offering me a spitty end—which I don’t take.

  “Can’t you ever take a day off from goody land?” she asks, but doesn’t really want to know.

  “Just think of me as the designated driver.”

  “Why aren’t you over there?” she asks, nodding in the direction of the boyfriend.

  “He seems to be occupied.” I really don’t like the way Laura and Georgie are reclining on Ben, but it is his body.

  “You need to hustle yo’ bustle, hun.”

  “That doesn’t even mean anything,” I say. “Don’t just copy them all the time.”

  “Jeez, kidding.”

  I start a new installment of my ongoing rap language rave—how I hate the sexist language, the sexist clips, how I think Lupe had it half right with “Bitch Bad.”

  But Holly has glazed over. She wonders why I care and is looking much more interested in Ben’s friends Vincent and Hugo, who have wandered within range, just as I am realizing I’m going to have to move farther away from the water. The pebbles are just sliding back when I dig them.

  “What’s this? Not Sibylla, the model, complaining about sexism?” says Hugo. They are barking with laughter. It’s not taking much to amuse them in their current state. They’re wearing headbands they’ve made from blue-checked kitchen towels. For a nanosecond, I’m actually impressed they even know what sexism is.

  “But—trrrragedy has struck,” says Vincent, looking at the fish guts. “Her brain has dropped out of her ear hole.”

  More barking. But maybe I’ve got traction with guys like this these strange days, and I decide to use it, instead of pretending to be a good sport and let them say any dumb thing they find amusing while I give what I hope is an ironic, or noncommittal, smile.

  “Being gross doesn’t make you funny.”

  “And being on a billboard doesn’t make you pretty,” Vincent says.

  I catch the briefest flash of triumph in Holly’s eyes.

  “Yeee-owzer,” snorts Hugo. I guess he wonders if the blow was too savage.

  “You know the one thing I can’t tolerate is being told I’m not funny,” says Vincent in defense of the meanness that has made me go red. So much for traction.

  Holly opts for popularity-longing over friend-solidarity. “Lighten up, Sib.”

  She heads back after the boys, and it’s just me and the fish guts.

  There’s a much bigger fire going than we’re supposed to have. Our objective up here is “small footprint.” These guys interpret that very loosely, i.e., for “small,” read “yeti.” It worries me. Why me, but no one else? Holly’s right: I am a goody-goody. I should lighten up.

  Kevin Trung is here. His dad is a famous TV chef, and Kevin actually knows how to cook. There’s a small amount of cooking we can do in the houses, and every boy in our grade was hoping he’d get Kevin. He’s got a coal pit organized and is doing good things with the trout fillets. I smell lemongrass and ginger.

  After dinner, everyone is in a circle around the fire. People start calling out their numbers, a ripped safety drill accompanied by spurts of helpless laughter.

  I want to go to bed. I was hoping there might be some alone time with Ben, but he’s still surrounded, stoned, and showing no sign of trying to escape. I’m cold, and either he picks up that signal or, more likely, he’s getting up anyway and sees me hugging my knees. He unwinds his scarf and wraps it around my neck, to a chorus of awwwws from the people nearby who notice.

  Music blasts into the night, fracturing the lassitude. I’ve got so mean about carrying anything extra in my backpack over the last couple of weeks I can’t believe that someone bothered to bring iPod
speakers. Everyone is up on their feet. It feels primitive dancing next to the fire. The moon is close to full, the fire bright, and in the freeze and burn, I’m soon as uncut as the next person, despite being sober. We warm to hot in a frieze of twisting shadows, and people start throwing off layers of clothes as the beat goes on and the dancing builds an intense life of its own. I shut my eyes, reckless and happy.

  We dance till we drop, and Ben pulls me down so we’re lying together, right next to the fire. I sit up again and see we are somehow in the middle of a make-out cluster, so I lie back down again. Why not?

  The black sky is sprayed bright with stars, an abundance we never see through the city’s competing light. We kiss till it gets unseemly—there’s no Ben and no me, just a breathless tangle of wanting. And we have to stop, or go somewhere private. We haven’t exactly had this conversation yet.

  The fireside crowd has thinned, and I didn’t even notice. Someone has put on parent music, “Helpless” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and it pulls me inside out. I have tears in my eyes, and I’m not sure if they’re happy or sad or if I’m just overflowing.

  “Hey, check it out, you can see the frying pan,” says Ben softly, eyes to the heavens.

  “You mean the saucepan?”

  “No, frying pan—and look, there’s the electric kettle.” I stare up until the stars start showing me their secret pictures.

  “There’s a unicorn with three legs,” I say.

  Ben follows my eye line and tries to see what I see. “Yes—either a unicorn or—a giant B.”

  “A letter B? As in B for barramundi?” I do see some looping script like waves forming a kind of B.

  “Bee, like bzzz, bzzz, bzzz—with a stinger.” He bites my arm.

  “Ow!” I laugh weakly, and I’m cold again, out of his arms, and shivery with wanting. “Bed,” I say, regret and desire and tiredness combining to make me feel like crying properly. Why can’t we be somewhere warm and alone?

  He rolls back on his side, up on his elbow, and gives me a mock sleazeball, “Your place or mine?”

  “Good night.”

  He tries to hold my hand, but I pull away. The other me drags Ben to my tent and tells Holly to Keep Out. That’s the me who doesn’t think about consequences like pregnancy, i.e., the anti-me.

  Actual me remembers the hideous sex ed person who came to school last year to tell us how satisfying “outercourse” could be, and knows that is about as far as I want to take things for now. I wonder how many people jump straight to “inter,” purely because you can just do it, no matter how inexpertly, whereas “outer” must involve some potentially embarrassing conversations, explanations, demonstrations, and maybe a pointer, or flow charts.

  “Are you okay? You look like something hurts.”

  “Just—remembering something—sad.” It was kind of sad how that one sex educator potentially put a whole grade off the idea just by using the word outercourse.

  Imagine if I’d answered, “Just remembering the whole ‘outercourse’ scenario—sounded like fun, don’t you think?” That word! Who would ever be able to say it out loud? Outerloud.

  Holly chooses now to come over with a major need for food and a bag of marshmallows from somewhere. I thought they were all eaten long ago. “You going to bed, Sibbie?” she slurs. “Bad luck, but all the more for me and Benjo.”

  It’s half awkward—I’ve got no reason to change my tiredness or my plan for bed, so I leave them trying to find a long enough stick for toasting their marshmallows.

  I look around—some people have dragged their sleeping bags to the side of the fire. Others have disappeared into tents, their own or others’.

  It’s a miracle with all the dancing and jumping and staggering and laughing that someone hasn’t fallen in. I get a stab of anxiety imagining that happening, the pain, the seared, blistering skin, the screaming, the panic, and how hard it would be to get airlifted out of here, or to try to carry someone out through the dark tunnel of the night.

  I must look worried, because when Kevin meets my eye, he smiles. “It’s okay—I’ll be fire warden. I’m not even tired.”

  So I walk away, climb into the tent, too cold to get undressed. I’m a babushka—thermals, outers, sleeping bag, tent. I am hammered by the tiredness that comes after so much fresh cold air, after a long walk with a heavy pack, after dancing, after desire that builds and builds and has nowhere to go. I get off quickly—the relief of being alone—with a few hungry pushes into my knowing fingers, and hear the voices of dreams pulling me down as I come. I’m asleep before I even register having settled into my bag.

  wednesday 24 october (night)

  A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

  William Wordsworth

  A slumber did my spirit seal;

  I had no human fears:

  She seemed a thing that could not feel

  The touch of earthly years.

  No motion has she now, no force;

  She neither hears nor sees;

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  Well, wrong gender pronoun, but the last stanza packs its punch. The cyclic certainty of it grinds over me like a wheel. Dear Fred.

  Upsetting letter from Dan today. He is getting to know his French family. And he really likes them. He told Henri about you, and Henri’s little brother was listening, which they didn’t realize, and so he found out, too. And it caused big trouble because Claude is only eight. He was so upset that Dan’s friend (you) had died. He thought only old people could die. So there was this big thing in their house about how it is so unusual, and it doesn’t happen very often… You can imagine: basically a whole lot of comforting half-lies to make the poor little guy feel okay about the order of the universe again.

  And when I read the letter, thank the god I don’t believe in, I was in my cave. I cried like a tap, Fred. Because I realized I’d thought only old people could die, too.

  Somewhere deep inside my stupid heart, that’s exactly what I’d thought.

  The tent is empty when I wake up, Holly’s sleeping bag gone. I’m hot, sweaty, sticky. I’d love a shower; just one of the many awful aspects of hiking is roughing it. Unwinding Ben’s scarf from around my neck, I sit up and reach for my boots.

  I walk far enough away from camp for a private wee, and go to the water’s edge for a wash using the smallest amount of soap possible—we’ve been drilled to death about trying to minimize polluting the perfect water. It’s refreshing to a painful degree, and I’m hyper-awake when I get back to the tent, dig cereal out of my pack, and head for the fire to see if I can scrounge some milk.

  Hiding my surprise should put me in line for an acting award when I see Holly and Ben, side by side, asleep by the edge of the still-glowing fire. The blond streaks and the dark curls are touching.

  “With friends like her… am I right?” says Hugo, gleeful, as he sees me.

  I take his milk, add it to my cereal calmly, hand it back, and stroll toward the sleeping bags, giving Holly a nudge with the toe of my boot to wake her.

  “Oh,” she says. “Whoa!” She jumps up as if something has bitten her. “This is not what it looks like.”

  “What does it look like?” I ask.

  “We were just talking. We must have fallen asleep.”

  “That’s what it looks like.” I’m eating my cereal slowly, trying not to bite the spoon in half. I refuse to get jealous: Holly is just being Holly. “You were very quiet when you came and got your bag. Thanks for not waking me.”

  Ben groans and turns, wakes, and smiles. He has none of Holly’s discomfiture. He is Ben. The prince of entitlement. “Hey, Sibs,” he says. “Got some cereal for me?”

  “No,” I say, carefully not annoyed. I sit down near him, but not near enough for him to grab my cereal.

  “I’ll get us both some,” Holly says. “My head hurts. Did someone give me alcohol?”

  “Me,” says Vincent, helping her stand up.
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  “You are evil,” she says happily.

  Holly only wants this—popularity, with the smallest of bad edges. I could do a diagram of it: daisy-shaped bad girl: enough risks so she’s “fun,” but not so many that she ever gets called a slut.

  We spend the morning dozing, eating, fabricating our hiking notebooks, and planning our staggered reemergence at school. Different times and different directions, so no one will guess that one mixed-gender group of eighteen spent a “weekend” lounging around three hours from school, resting and partying, when six single-gender groups of three were supposed to be conquering new terrains and hiking many miles.

  It wasn’t worth the stress. And it has left me feeling grumpy, for no real reason, with Holly and with Ben. But, uncharacteristically, Holly has exerted herself and packed up the tent when I get back from a wander downriver with the—yes—still-beautiful boy.

  Eliza has had a ball—she’s found (another) perfect running course and plans on coming back here soon. She’s happy prattling on about twitch fibers and the differing requirements within her training regime for building speed, endurance, and muscle, and how much and what sort of protein she needs to consume before and after exercise. Holly joins in every so often, offering bizarre “facts” from the world of the Gorgon’s eating rules book, which includes weird stuff like no carbs after 7 PM, and sundry other tasty and calorie-free tidbits that she’s picked up from various celebrity diets.

  They are walking a bit ahead; I am half listening and wondering about the hows and whys of being friends with Holly. Since we were first friends, it was understood that she was the more important one. She called the shots, and I went along. I had to put her first, but she could put me second. I had to be available, and ready to be dropped if a better offer came along. I could be, and often was, in trouble with her over various things entirely based on her whims. I, on the other hand, did not have automatic rights to be cross with her. Although even Holly understood that I would occasionally reach a breaking point resulting from active abuse or neglect, and crack. Then she had the option of soothing me and assuring me we were best friends, and I would sooner or later accept the assurances.