Flesh & Blood

by A. E. Dooland

  I rummaged around in my case for an old t-shirt, pulling it on. Thinking of that last text message, I smiled to myself. “Yeah.”

  Bree sighed with audible relief. “Awesome,” she said. “So that means Gemma can help me with my Maths homework, right?”

  I turned back to her, giving her a pained look. “She’s flying out to Thailand tomorrow.”

  Bree’s face fell. “Oh…” she said, but still managed a very convincing. “Well, I hope she has heaps of fun…”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and made her scoot over so I could fit, putting an arm around her as I climbed under the doona. “If your test is next week, you’ll probably learn all the stuff you need to know in class before it, yeah?”

  She seemed doubtful. “Mr Preston always wants us to have the exercises done before class so he just focuses on the stuff we can’t do. Like you can’t even say ‘I can’t do any of it’ because he always thinks that’s just me making excuses for being lazy and not doing the homework. But here, look at these,” she reached across and grabbed her sparkly tablet from the bedside table, switching it on and showing me the problems. I had to admit they actually looked pretty damn hard. “See?” she said. “So I was hoping Gemma would be able to help, because she always gets really excited about the problems that are presented like stories.”

  “Well, she’s getting excited about beaches and palm trees for the next two weeks, I think,” I told her, helping her put the tablet back on the bedside table as we shuffled down the mattress and lay down. “She might help after that, I don’t know. But maybe you’ll be able to find something on the Internet in the meantime? Or maybe your friends can help?”

  “Maybe…” Bree said at length, and then lay her head on my shoulder. She didn’t sound very confident.

  I didn’t feel particularly confident, either; not that I’d ever tell her that. Bree could turn out a reasonable English essay—I always found how righteous and passionate she got about her arguments to be kind of endearing—but maths was not her strong suit. If Gemma’s intensive help had only lifted her from 51 to 64, I was worried about what losing Gemma would do to her average, and what a sliding average meant to whether or not she was allowed to stay at Cloverfield.

  If I’d just put myself $21,550 in debt for Bree to only get an extra two weeks at Cloverfield… I didn’t know how I’d handle that. Would I tell Bree what I’d done? What would it achieve? It would make her feel extra bad for not only costing me money, but also not being able to keep her marks up. Then again, I wasn't sure I could keep that sort of secret from her for very long, or that it was the right thing to do, and I couldn’t stop stressing about it.

  I don’t know what time I fell asleep as a result, but it only felt like five minutes before someone was vigorously shaking me. “Wake up, Min,” that was Rob’s voice. “Come on, mate, we’ve got to get going.”

  Somehow I managed to get up to dress myself in a combination of my own clothes and the ones Rob lent me, and then I packed an overnight bag full of whatever was in arms’ reach, stumbling out of the house into Rob’s ute. I think I slept for the first hour, though, because I don’t remember leaving Sydney or when Rob stopped to grab breakfast. As I woke up and tried to figure out where the fuck I was and what was going on, he pushed a brown paper bag at me while he kept his eyes on the highway. “Here,” he said. “Maccas, brekky of champions.”

  I could smell it. I took it off him and opened the bag, salivating at the contents. I didn’t really do early breakfasts, but I could make an exception for fast food. “Thanks,” I said, and then worried about the fact it was probably $10. “What do I owe you?”

  He shook his head. “It’s great to have company on the drive,” he explained, gesturing out the windscreen. His high-beams lit the road, but it was still dark. Over the high mountains on the horizon, though, a dim light was beginning to glow: daybreak. “You see? It’s not that entertaining out here.”

  I already had a mouthful of Egg McSomething or whatever he’d bought me, so I swallowed hurriedly. “Must have been pretty entertaining watching me sleep for an hour.”

  He laughed; in the small space it was so loud it nearly burst my eardrums. “Nah, it’s great to have you,” he said. “Honestly, most corporate folks look down their noses at manual work, but it’s great. Today, you know what we’re doing? We’re building a house. It’s for a pair of newlyweds—childhood sweethearts, Daz reckons they are—and they’re going to start their family out there on the coast. Their kids will spend their whole childhood running between the waves and the veranda. They’ll remember it forever, and we’re going to make it for them, with these.” He held up a hand and twinkled his fingers. “You can’t do that in an office. Maybe you won’t want to go back.”

  I chuckled at him. He was hugely sentimental for a guy who at first glance looked like he’d be more comfortable punching someone than hugging them. “Honestly, I’m just really happy to get some work.”

  “Nah, I reckon you’ll love it,” he said, beginning to gush. “I love working with that lot, they’re great. Daz you know, but then there’s the other guys,” Rob went through the other four men, who all had incredibly Aussie names like ‘Jonno’, and ‘Jules’, and ‘Fitzy’, telling me about who they were and listing the states and towns they were from. “All country boys like me,” he declared. “They’re real good value. Jonno’s a licenced sparkie but he’s not too proud to lay some bricks. Just a bunch of really unpretentious blokes.”

  He told me a few stories about them, and they sounded pretty nice, if in a really ocker, blokey way that I didn’t fully understand. Still, if they were like Rob, I could probably really enjoy working with them. Maybe this job would end up being more than a couple of days after all. It was comforting to imagine not having to worry about my finances anymore.

  The rest of the drive was pleasant. We lost radio reception so Rob stuck in a classic rock cassette tape—I couldn’t believe those even existed anymore—and sang along to it. He was definitely a better singer than Bree, and by the time the sun was starting to brim over the horizon, we were turning off on a yellow sand road to the beach and pulling up behind several other utes.

  Between us and the ocean was a big shell of a house with half-finished brick walls. The rest of the walls were covered with blue tarps which flapped loudly against the drywall in the chilly morning breeze. The air smelt of salt, seaweed, and someone’s morning BBQ; I looked along the foreshore to another house some distance away. There were other houses, too, but they were so generously spaced that they didn’t interfere with the feeling of solitude. Even though the wind chill was about minus a hundred, it was beautiful. It seemed like a really nice place to build a family home.

  While I was distracted, Rob startled me by dumping a huge box of tools in my arms. I nearly dropped it. “Here, could you take those around the front while I get the rest of the stuff out of the tray?”

  I gulped. “Sure,” I said, and began to work my way around the tarps.

  I was busy watching my footing in the sand when I rounded the front of the house. There, in front of me, were four white guys all in their high viz jumpers, seated on collapsible chairs and passing around a thermos. I smiled in reflex when I noticed little things Rob had told me about—“Fitzy has more freckles than Gemma!”—but then I noticed how rough they looked. How blokey they were. From their hard-knocks appearance, it was clear they worshipped at the altar of traditional masculinity—I did not feel good about that—and they were all looking at me. Not like I was an old friend, either.

  My blood ran cold.

  “Ey! What do we have here?” One of them shouted, standing up. Jonno, I think. He sounded friendly enough, but it felt like the opening scene in a Hollywood movie before the protagonist gets beaten up. My legs felt weak; I wanted to turn around and go running back to Rob.

  He came up to me while I was standing there, frozen. He was as tall as me. “Daz never mentioned Rob was bringing fresh meat!” he said, clapping me on th
e back. I tried not to cough. “So what are you, bro?”

  I didn’t understand his question, so I stared at him, panicking. Was he talking about my race? My gender?

  “He probably doesn’t speak English, Jonno,” Fitzy called from the circle of deck chairs, “Look at him. He’s probably fresh off the boat.”

  While I was reeling from that, another one of them casually piped up with, “Nah, Daz said he’d never hire illegals, maybe he’s just a student.”

  Jesus Christ. “I am a student,” I managed before they could say anything else fucked, and they all looked at me as if they were totally shocked I could speak. “Or I’m about to be, anyway.”

  “There we go!” Jonno told the others, presenting me to them like I was a performing animal. “So what’re you studying? Let me guess: medicine?”

  I felt sick. I almost wanted to lie. “Art.”

  They all looked at each other, eyebrows up. It wasn’t because they were impressed, either: they were smirking. “Well, that sounds fancy,” Jonno said, slinging a menacing arm over my shoulder to lead me to where they were drinking coffee. “But don’t worry. This job’ll put some meat on those scrawny arms. Come sit with the boys!”

  I was literally at the point of throwing up from fear when I heard a familiar voice. “Hey, you’re here!” that was Daz, thank god.

  He ducked out from under one of the tarps, looking just as tattooed as I remembered him. He grabbed the thermos off one of the younger men to take a swig off it. “That’s the stuff,” he said, and then gestured at me. “So, I see you all met Min.” He thumped me collegially on the shoulder. “Thanks for the help. Because of the fucking weather and this useless mob here, we’re miles behind.” He was grinning at them as he said that. Apparently they all related to each other through insults.

  “Easy, Daz,” Jonno said, his arm still threateningly across my shoulders. “You’re going to make Min here think we’re a pack of bludgers.”

  Daz laughed. “Well, I don’t know what you told her—” The breath caught in my throat. “—But she’ll learn pretty quickly how shit you all are. Come on, get up, let’s get going.” He took a few steps back towards the house.

  No one else moved, because they were all staring at me.

  My vision greyed. It was like one of those nightmares where you’re stuck in place and unable to move.

  “’She’?” Jonno asked, and quickly retracted his arm. He seemed a bit irritated. “Why didn’t you say you were a girl?”

  Daz opened his mouth. God, he was going to say it. He was going to say it. “Because she’s not,” he told them casually as Rob came around the side of the house. “What’s the word? I forget the word. Transsexual, is it? But she’s not a girl anymore.”

  Rob looked alarmed. “Hey!” he called to Daz. “What the fuck are you doing, mate? It’s ‘he’ outside the house. Only Sares and co ‘she’ him.”

  “Oh,” Daz said, and then looked appraisingly at me. “You serious? Why the fuck didn’t you say so? I’m not psychic. Oh well, there’s only one letter difference between ‘she’ and ‘he’, right?” he said, thumping me on the shoulder again and lifting the tools out of my hands. “Thanks for bringing these.”

  All the other men were looking at each other with a mixture of confusion and intrigue. One of them laughed like he’d just heard a really good story. “What the fuck? What is that then?” he was looking down at my tracksuit pants; I’d worn the packer today. My cheeks went bright red.

  Daz tossed the guy something that looked like a giant cake server. “Like you don’t stuff socks down your undies, Jules, you total soft cock,” he said, and the others tittered. “Come on, get going!” He drummed on the fabric of one of the chairs. “I don’t pay you to sit around drinking coffee, girls, let’s go!”

  The crew all reluctantly got up, giving me some sideways looks on their way over to the pallets of bricks, and whispering to each other. I wasn’t very happy about the gendered slur Daz had levelled at them, but they were like a pack of schoolgirls, stealing looks at me and laughing to each other.

  Fantastic, I thought, standing at the corner of the house while they all tried to avoid being landed with the task of teaching me anything. I’m in high school again.

  It took the entire period of time Daz spent orienting me around the work site for me to catch my breath and process what had happened. What was most difficult to get my head around was the fact none of the men seemed to think anything was wrong with that introduction; Daz, in particular, was just being friendly and jovial as if he hadn’t outed me in the most painful fucking fashion to my workmates. Still, I supposed it was a step up from my last boss telling me to keep my ‘Asian-ladyboy bullshit’ at home. At least Daz didn’t mean to cause trouble for me, and at least with the other men avoiding me, they weren’t asking me really private questions like it was Discuss Min’s Genitals Day or, I don’t know, tripping me, or whatever the male version of nasty schoolgirls was.

  Rob didn’t appear to notice much was wrong, either. When Daz went to go check what the other guys were up to, Rob demonstrated how to mix the mortar—joking and chatting like he did when he was happy—and then taught me how to prep for laying without mentioning anything about the other guys or what they’d said. We set up the levelling string together, and then he supervised me shakily trying to lay brick by brick on the already half-finished wall. When he was satisfied I wasn’t going to screw up, he got a saw and spent some time cutting bricks for the fiddly edges while I filled in the dipping centres.

  Once I got into the routine of it, it was strangely relaxing; if I discounted the laughing and joking the other guys were doing around the other side and the fact I was pointedly absent from it. With my hands busy, I had a lot of time to think. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have minded that, but this morning, all I could think about was the fact that I’d left Frost specifically to avoid the sort of treatment I was getting on this work site. I didn’t have the luxury of walking out this time either: not with my enormous debts. I sighed.

  That got Rob’s attention. “You right?” he asked, giving me a long, measured look. My jaw tightened, and I buttered another brick and carefully laid it. My silence must have been answer enough, because he looked thoughtful, guessing what I was stressing about. “I didn’t understand your whole gender thing at first, either. It’s not something that’s in your face every day much, is it? I didn’t know it existed. But still, it doesn’t mean they won’t see you working and see you’re just like them,” he told me. “They were a bit wary of me first, too. But they’re good blokes, they’ll come good.”

  I wasn’t just like them, though. That was the problem. I knew what I wanted to say: ‘if they’re wary of a regular straight white tradie, how are they going to feel about a genderqueer Korean artist?’ I didn’t say it, though. Maybe he was right and they would end up being fine about it, though, who knew.

  At lunch, the boys all drove into a nearby town to eat. I didn’t go because on top of not wanting to feel like the ugly kid no one picks for dodgeball, I also really didn’t want to spend any money. Rob gave me a bit of a sad look as he left, but it was a relief when they were all gone.

  I washed my hands and grabbed a banana from my bag, going to sit on the sandbank to wait for Sarah to call me after she’d checked up on Henry.

  I braced myself when I first took my phone out, expecting to be bombarded with flashing LEDs and a tonne of notifications, but that wasn’t what was on my screen at all. My phone was dead still, and the lock screen just displayed the clock. For one beautiful second my heart lifted, and I thought maybe, just maybe, Mum was getting sick of constantly bothering me and had gotten herself another hobby… and then I noticed the little alert up the top of my screen: no data coverage. I sighed. There went that fantasy, but at least she couldn’t bother me out here. That nearly made up for the rednecks I was working with.

  While I was enjoying being able to look at the screen of my phone without feeling excruciating anxiety, it occu
rred to me that it had been several days since I’d stopped engaging with her wedding bullshit. Come to think of it, the last day had been before Bree’s catastrophic dinner, hadn’t it? That was—I counted—five days ago. Nearly six. I felt uneasy, but I had enough to worry about without rehashing all of that crap.

  It took Sarah longer than I expected to report back to me, and I was busy trying to figure out if one bar of signal was enough when the phone buzzed in my hands.

  “YOU TOLD HIM. NOT COOL.”

  I blinked at that. Told Henry, she meant? It took me a couple of seconds to figure out she meant the fact she was pregnant. Maybe she was being ironic, though, because of course I hadn’t. I went with that. “Told Rob, you mean? I’m pretty sure he already knows ;)”

  I had another bite of my banana, waiting for her to fire something back. Maybe she was messing with me? I’d finished my banana and she still hadn’t texted back. That made me worry; maybe she was serious. “…because Rob’s the only guy I would have told anything to in the last few months,” I typed, and when I didn’t get a response to that, either, I added, “Because, as you know, I’m not talking to Henry, which is the whole reason I asked you to check up on him.” I was midway through typing something else when she replied.

  “Okay, okay. That’s kind of a good point. Sorry I went off at you, he just clearly already knows and it’s REALLY weird, that’s all.”

  I wasn’t surprised. “He probably just guessed. His sister is pretty much constantly pregnant, and they’re close. She’s pregnant right now, in fact. With twins.”