~
Autumn has bleached everything grey. Sunlight, when it does appear, merely splinters across the sky. Even the smells around the campus are tarnished. And it rains now, steady rain falling in large, icy drops.
One afternoon Ronnie gets a letter from home. After she’s read it, she flings herself across her bed, wailing, and her contortions of grief make me want to fall on the ground and weep too.
‘Her dog died,’ I hear someone whisper.
When Ronnie finally drags herself up, she takes a few deep breaths and wipes her eyes, before folding the letter over and tucking it inside her top drawer. There is something defiant in her face, something grainy and hard.
Everyone is miserable during the first weeks back at school. There is more crying, especially at night, before bed. Letters come from home that seem to set one girl off at a time, until half the house is in tears, including me.
‘What’s the matter?’ Emma asks when she finds me sobbing at the end of the bed.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, letting out a strangled laugh. ‘I’m just sad.’
It must be the cold depleting our spirits. Last term it was fine not having any heating because the house still stayed warm into the night. But now it’s cold all the time. The study is the worst: even with the fire roaring, a draught seems to stalk along the floor and work its way into my clothes.
One night there’s a particularly nasty draught in the study. When Simone and I go to inspect its source, we find one of the dorm’s back windows still open. Too high to reach, we take my desk chair down the other end of the aisle. Simone almost has the pane shut when Miss McKinney walks in.
‘What are you doing?’
I smile at Simone. Der, what does it look like?
‘It’s freezing in the study, so we’re just closing this window.’
Miss McKinney isn’t listening. ‘You should have asked my permission to leave your desks,’ she says. ‘Get down from there.’
Simone doesn’t move. ‘I’m almost done.’
I watch Miss McKinney reach out and begin to shake the chair. Simone teeters, and for a moment I think she’ll fall. Alarm flashes in her dark eyes, swiftly followed by another, steelier look.
‘I said get down!’
I’ve always liked Miss McKinney. She isn’t hard like some teachers. Most mornings at chapel she sings in a faltering soprano. ‘Jerusalem’ is her favourite. Tonight her fringe is greasy, her glasses smudged with fingerprints. There are fresh lines around her eyes—stress lines, probably. It would be so easy to make fun of her; she can’t know how hard we try not to—if she did, she wouldn’t be acting like this.
Now Miss McKinney turns to me. ‘You know,’ she says, ‘the problem with you girls is you think you can do whatever you want.’
Simone and I are marched down the hill to the science labs. Miss McKinney puts us in separate rooms, locking us inside. It’s even colder and draughtier in here than it was in the house.
I call out to Simone, but when I don’t get a reply I sit at a desk, shivering under the throbbing lights. Every now and then I’m startled by sounds outside, but eventually I rest my head on the desk and close my eyes.
It seems like hours before Miss McKinney returns. When she finally unlocks the door, she stands on the landing and beckons me, smacking her hands against her thighs, like she would to a dog. ‘So,’ she says, escorting Simone and me back to the house, ‘have you learnt your lesson?’ When we don’t reply she begins to whistle.
In the dorm everyone is tucked up in bed, the lights already out. We’ve missed weekly supper, which I had been looking forward to all evening. While Simone and I get changed in the tog room, Portia barks for us to hurry up. ‘You’re keeping us awake!’
By the time I’m warm under the covers I need to get up for the toilet. As I creep along the aisle I hear muffled crying. It’s coming from Simone’s bed. I stop, my arms and legs bristling in the cold. I know I should go to her, see if she is all right, but I can feel Portia’s eyes locked on me from the pocket of darkness around her bed, so I walk past without even pausing.
It’s dark when my alarm goes off for slush. It’s only my second morning on duty, but it still takes every ounce of willpower to throw back the covers. Huddled at the end of the bed, I pull on a pair of ratty jeans, a flannel shirt that belonged to Dad and a woollen jumper, grabbing my Blundstones from my locker in the tog room.
Behind the chapel a hazy sun starts to rise, dragging up a few clouds. I lurch down the path, steam shooting from my mouth. At the steps I always stop to gaze out across the campus. I don’t know why I do this—everything has been dulled by the wintery sky, like silver with the shine worn off. I haven’t seen blue in weeks, while the rain now falls on the house’s tin roof with the persistence of a metronome.
In the kitchen Monsieur Gerrard, our chef, is hunched over a stainless-steel bench. The room is filled with the heady stench of breakfast: enormous vats of porridge and baked beans bubble on the stove, bacon sizzles and cracks on the grill. Further along is the industrial toaster, which runs like a conveyer belt with row after row of sliced bread.
‘Hi, Monsieur Gerrard,’ I call.
He spins around. He’s brandishing a meat cleaver, and his white apron is spattered with blood. ‘Bonjour, Rebecca!’ He holds up a skinless creature by the feet. ‘Lapin,’ he says with a grin. ‘Rabbit.’
I prepare my serving trolley, stacking the trays with bowls and plates still warm from the wash, aluminium containers of food at the top. Once the other slushies have done the same, we all sit down to our own breakfast.
Across the table is Max, from Blue House. He has dark hair and dark eyes—he’s Jewish, I’ve heard. I’ve never met a Jewish person before and I turn red any time he looks at me. I suppose I have a crush on him, and later that night I write in my diary, I love Max. It’s the first time I’ve written about a boy, but I wouldn’t tell anyone that. Simone’s diary is practically blacked out with all her declarations of love, a new name just about every day. But as I stare at those three words, imprisoned in a garish red heart, it seems more and more like an illusion, and my eyes start to swim, until the letters have broken up and floated away.
~
The early mornings begin to take their toll. Large, angry bruises appear beneath my eyes, while my skin has a yellowish tinge to it. I develop a cough that brings up phlegm laced with blood. In class I hardly say a word, sitting in the back row, wishing I could put my head down on the laminate desk and sleep for weeks. Except that I’m chilled to my bones—the classrooms aren’t heated, either. Only in science is anyone animated, jostling around the Bunsen burners like they’re open fireplaces.
I’m also not sleeping well. No matter how exhausted I am, as soon as my head hits the pillow I’m wide awake, my mind racing. Mostly I think about Portia—how I might try to talk to her in the morning, what I might say to make her laugh. During the day I feel constantly on edge, paranoid about how to act around her and Ronnie and Briohny, who always seems to be waiting to catch me out in some blunder.
But it’s the cold that keeps me awake most. When the sun drops behind the hill the temperature in the dorm plummets. Some girls have hot-water bottles, which they keep at the end of the bed for their feet. I’ve written to Mum, asking her to send me one. I go to bed wearing two pairs of socks, a jumper, a beanie and sometimes gloves. Like rot, the cold seems to work its way into my bed, seeping up through the floor and into the mattress. Most nights it feels like I’m lying on a slab of ice, my doona a thin sheet of pastry.
‘You don’t look so hot,’ says Simone one morning on the way to class. ‘Are you feeling okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I snap. Simone is always smooth-skinned; I don’t think I’ve ever seen her with bags under her eyes.
‘Sorry.’ She frowns. ‘Just asking.’
Watching her trudge off, I want to cry. I wish I could forget about Portia and Briohny and Ronnie, and be happy with the friends I have. Why do I need more?
~<
br />
My Outdoor Education teacher, a young man with a big nose and ruddy cheeks, talks a lot about resilience. You need it, he says, for hiking, running, schoolwork. ‘You need it for life itself,’ he says theatrically. But he never says you need resilience for the house, to survive a year with fifteen other girls.
Portia’s new favourite is Sarah. They do everything together now—sit with each other at meals, whisper across the study during prep, escape to the bush out the back of the house to smoke.
Whenever I think about them, I feel a bit sick. I don’t understand what went wrong. Why doesn’t she like me anymore? How am I different this term from last? I want to shout at her.
I get it into my head that there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. That if I can just talk to Portia about everything, make her understand how much I value our friendship, how important it is to me and how loyal I am to her, things will change. But it’s hard to get any time with her around the house. So I start waiting for her after breakfast, jogging to match her pace back up the hill. I offer her lollies from my tuck box when I offer to no one else, not even Emma. I even ask if she’d like me to make her hot chocolate in the evenings.
I shudder at the humiliation of it. I know how it must look. And I can see how the other girls watch on with surprise, knowing their surprise will soon transform into disgust and disrespect. But I can’t help myself. I have to be her friend again; I need to know that she cares about me, that I didn’t dream the last term.
One night, when I’m brushing my teeth, Ronnie draws me aside. ‘Maybe just leave it,’ she says, ‘around Portia and stuff? Try not to be so . . . I don’t know . . . desperate. Yeah, Bec?’ Her eyes are gentle, but I recoil as if she’d hit me.
I run sobbing from the bathroom and hide outside behind the woodpile. A few minutes pass before Emma wades into the cold. ‘Come on, Bec,’ she calls. ‘It’s time to stop caring so much about Portia.’
‘It’s fine for you,’ I shout back. ‘She likes you.’
‘But you know she’ll soon start hating on someone else,’ Emma reasons, wiping her nose on her sleeve. Out here, on the path outside the boiler room, her ragged breath comes out in white clouds. She always breathes like that—loudly, snottily—and it should drive me mad.
‘What?’ she now says, because I am grinning as I step out from behind the woodpile. I can’t help it. I can’t believe how easily—how wilfully—I forget how much Emma cares for me. Because I love her back, I really do, like I would love a sister if I had one.
~
Miss Lacey hosts afternoon tea. She offers us scones and cups of coffee, and chocolate bunnies and eggs left over from Easter. Her house is small and brown, same as Red House, with a cramped living area and an electric heater and a television in the corner. But it is cosy, like a proper home, with loads of books lining the shelves.
Miss Lacey pulls out a copy of The Grapes of Wrath and hands it to me. ‘This is Steinbeck’s best,’ she says. ‘Have a read of it after you’ve finished Of Mice and Men and tell me what you think.’ She smiles, and gives my shoulder a squeeze on the way past.
Books are about the only thing Miss Lacey and I talk about with any degree of warmth. She knows so much about literature, and I like these brief moments, when all the old animosity is forgotten and she looks at me like she’s interested in what I have to say.
It is kind of Miss Lacey to go to this trouble, I think as she hands around more eggs. Especially after we’ve been so horrible. I peel off the foil and pop the chocolate into my mouth. Maybe things will be different from now on. Maybe we’ll all start to like her again.
We wander back to the house as a group. Everyone is chatty from all the sugar, and from being unexpectedly spoilt. I hang towards the back, reaching over to pick up stones and dropping them back on the ground. Portia walks a few paces ahead of me, but as we near Mr Hillman’s house she stops.
‘Sorry,’ I say after bumping into her.
I feel breath on my neck, can even smell it, sour from the tea, and I turn around. It’s Sarah. The whiteheads on her cheeks have returned in an angry rash. She is looking past me, to Portia. Suddenly both girls grab me around the waist.
‘Hold her,’ Portia says.
As Sarah pins back my arms, Portia begins fumbling with my jeans. I’m too stunned to move. Portia can’t get the zip, but my jeans are baggy so she pulls them down over my bum. I watch them reach for my underwear, gathering up the elastic band at the front and back.
‘Ready?’ Portia says. A vein bulges weirdly at her throat.
They hoist me up by my underwear, lifting me clean off the ground. The pain is awful, burning between my legs. I start thrashing, arms and legs flying about, and I manage to kick Portia in the shin. They drop me.
‘You fucking bitches,’ I shriek. ‘What is wrong with you?’
I can hardly see through the tears. Cowering, the cold breeze blows against my bare skin. They’ve almost torn my underwear in half.
Portia and Sarah glance at each other and laugh, high-fiving. I can just make out the rest of the girls walking further up the road. No one has even noticed what just happened.
In the shower that night I wash my bottom and between my legs, alarmed when the flannel comes away stained with blood. I cry under the hot water, feeling ashamed and dirty. Afterwards, I get dressed in the locked toilet cubicle.
I’m about to climb into bed when I sense someone behind me. Before I can move, icy fingers are at the band of my pyjamas, followed by the nip of the elastic against my waist. I spin around to see Portia stalking back down the aisle.
‘Snap,’ she says.
I expect it to be cold inside the house, but the sun blazes through the windows, heating up the study like a conservatory. The smell is familiar, almost cloying: faintly smoky, but also waxy. There are logs in the bin beside the fireplace, and newspapers in a neat stack. The desks are set out just as I remember them, like they’ve never been moved.
In the dorm I make my way down the aisle, touching the bed ends gingerly. The floorboards creak beneath my feet. There seem to be fewer girls in Red House now. Kendall’s bed stands where I last saw it, first on the right at the top of the aisle; Simone’s is still opposite. Like the study the dorm is also familiar, but its differences are unsettling. Different quilts, different shoes beside the beds, different posters on the walls: Robert Pattinson and that boofy-haired kid from One Direction; others I don’t recognise at all. There are even a couple of laptops on the bottom shelves of the bedside tables.
I stop at Red 12, my old bed. This area is sparser than the others, with a grey quilt thrown over a thin blanket. There aren’t any posters on the brown wall, no photographs propped up beside the bed. I stare at the nametag, aware of the childish urge to rip it off. It’s like walking past a house you once lived in and seeing someone else in your old bedroom. It feels like something has been taken from me.
I move to the windowsill. Grass and clusters of shrubs grow beneath the window. No dirt, no dust. Far off, over the roofs of other houses, the trees are taller, fuller. My eyes snag on Yellow House, tucked away against the road, and I grin, remembering how after lights-out Portia and I used to shine our torches at a window to piss off the girls sleeping inside their dorm. Only later did I find out it was Ruby’s window, and after we’d become friends tormenting Yellow House wasn’t so much fun anymore.
I haven’t seen Ruby in a long time. We have lost touch. It’s an odd expression: to lose touch. As though it was a cursory, careless mistake; more apt for describing a lost train ticket than a friend.
I sit on the edge of the bed. After Silver Creek, at the magnificent Big School on the edge of an azure bay, I had many friends. It was hard not to, when every day, almost every waking hour, I was surrounded by the girls and boys of my day house, Boyd. There we shared studies and common rooms and communal lunch. The days were long and full. After school there was sports practice or activities, like music club or hobbies. We ate dinner at school in the grand
old dining hall, and afterwards went back to the house for evening prep. I never had a spare second to myself—from the moment I left home at 6.45 am to the crowded bus trip home, returning at 10 pm. We didn’t have weekends free, either: every Saturday there was compulsory tennis or hockey or athletics.
After I finished school I went straight to university. I was seventeen years old. I had a place in Creative Arts at Melbourne University, and the subjects I was enrolled in, such as Writing Character and Film Noir, didn’t sound like study at all.
Only a few friends from school joined me at university that year. Ruby had enrolled in a different degree, as had Simone (though she only stayed a semester before deferring) and another good friend, Marina. One or two were also living in the colleges on campus, which seemed to me like another version of school, with dormitories and communal meals. But most of my friends had taken a year off to work in boarding schools in the UK.
On the first day of university, one tutor asked everyone to introduce themselves. Many students mentioned what school they’d come from, but when it came to my turn, someone actually laughed when I told them the name of my school.
I felt myself blush to the roots of my hair. What’s so funny about that? I wanted to ask. But my anger soon faded to something more docile: I felt like a fraud among these bearded, slightly pongy people. I wasn’t a writer or a painter or a filmmaker. I wasn’t creative. I loved literature, but I’d never written it. These students were arty, alternative—they had tattoos, wore fisherman pants and had piercings. They all seemed so much older than me, and they all appeared to know what they wanted.
During that first week students moved everywhere in groups of two or three or four. If only I could find someone else on their own, strike up a conversation, make a friend. But I was too shy to talk to anyone, and at the end of the second week, as I watched groups of boys and girls gather outside the lecture hall and head off together for coffee at the café outside the library, laughing and clearly already familiar with each other, I felt the first sharp pang of loneliness.
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