When I think back to university, I think of quiet. Long stretches of silence. Sometimes I would go a whole day without talking to anyone; I could sit through a tutorial and not say a word.
When I told Mum that I was having trouble making new friends, she shrugged and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ve got lots of friends already.’
She didn’t understand. What I’d had with most of my school friends—that hadn’t been friendship at all. That had been the habit of the familiar, the reassurance of the unchanged. I was starting to learn that I wasn’t good with change.
What is wrong with me? I used to wonder. I longed to have someone to grab lunch with from Union House, or to go for a beer with after lectures. Most days I ate my packed lunch on a windswept bench, before scurrying away to the library to watch French films borrowed from the vast VHS collection. I’d always liked my own company but this wasn’t a happy kind of solitude. It felt as if something was absent, missing.
Sometimes I’d meet Ruby for afternoon tea. Other times I’d meet up with Marina for lunch at Tiamo on Lygon Street. We grew close during that first semester, hanging out most weekends. We were drawn together, I think, by our loneliness: while Marina had made one or two new friends, she’d never moved away from her family or their influence.
Over minestrone we’d talk about the future: after graduation, when we were working and living out of home. That was when life would begin; happiness was at the imaginary finish line. Marina would work in finance, earn big bucks. My ambitions were more watery—I wanted to write and work with words.
‘And drive a sports car,’ Marina laughed. ‘We’ve got to have the matching sports cars.’
~
I’d never been all that interested in boys. I’d been on a few dates here and there, and I’d had a boyfriend for a couple of months in Year 11, but nothing more serious than that.
In my second year of uni, I started going out with Fraser. I’d met him through a school friend; they were in the same college. Fraser wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts and RM Williams boots, and he studied commerce.
I liked having a boyfriend. I liked to hear the words ‘I have a boyfriend’ coming out of my mouth. Fraser had even visited my parents’ house a couple of times and met my mother. He had a car, a shiny ute, and we went out once a week for a meal or to a movie, and on Friday or Saturday night we’d go to the pub or a nightclub and get very drunk. I didn’t really know how to talk to Fraser sober. In the mornings he’d drive me home. We never spoke much on these rides, and as we cruised over the West Gate Bridge, the oily water below, Fraser would lean forward to turn up the radio, Nova FM or the Fox, and I’d press my head against the warm window, a hangover pulsing behind my eyes.
Towards the end of the relationship I convinced myself that I loved him. Not with any burning passion, but because that is what you were supposed to feel for your boyfriend after six months together. I don’t think he loved me—not at the end, anyway. We broke up over the phone after he told me he didn’t want me coming to Noosa with him and his mate. But I didn’t feel sad: it felt more like a breach of trust, as though he’d told someone a secret about me.
I didn’t go out with anyone else for a long time. I wasn’t interested in meeting new people. I felt cold, sexless. Occasionally I’d go out, get drunk and hook up with some guy, and whenever this happened I felt like I had moved outside of myself, watching what we were doing from high above. It was lonely, just like the tutorials.
~
At the time all of this was happening I had started reading Mrs Dalloway for one of my creative writing classes. One afternoon on the way home from uni, I read the passage where Clarissa walks through the garden at night, Sally Seton at her side, and Sally picks her a flower and kisses her.
The most exquisite moment of her whole life . . .
I put the book down. My hands had begun to shake and my face had flushed bright red. While Melbourne’s industrial west flitted past in a blur of steel, I took a few deep breaths, glancing around the carriage to see if any other passengers had felt what I was feeling too—the urgent, intense realisation that this was what love was. This was what my love was.
But it didn’t seem possible. Was I gay? How could I be? I was still living with my parents. Still in my old bedroom, with its single bed and rose-patterned wallpaper, practically unchanged since I was a girl. How would I ever find out?
I worked a few nights a week at a restaurant down on the waterfront called the Quarry. After a year or so, I had finally made a friend there—an Italian girl named Georgia, who had moved to Melbourne with her boyfriend. Georgia’s English was patchy, and I had been teaching her bits and pieces during our shifts.
I liked Georgia. She stomped around the restaurant muttering in Italian about the customers, and every half hour she smoked angrily out the back by the cool room. She didn’t like any of the other staff; I’d often catch her rolling her eyes at our boss. But she laughed uproariously at almost anything I said, even when I wasn’t trying to be funny. ‘Oh, Beckina,’ she would sigh. ‘You are wonderful.’
After our boozy staff Christmas party, a group of us headed into town. As the taxi crawled along Flinders Street, someone suggested we go to a gay bar—‘For a laugh!’
We were dropped off outside a pub called the Stanley, in Collingwood. While the others went off to dance, Georgia and I sat on stools at the downstairs bar. Not the girlish mecca I had anticipated, the Stanley was full of steam, sweaty men and very tall transvestites.
‘So, Beckina,’ Georgia shouted over the music, ‘why you not have a boyfriend?’
I laughed, toying with the coaster on the bar.
Georgia sucked on her cigarette. ‘You like the woman? You lesbian?’
I shifted in my seat. ‘I don’t know.’
‘But you come to this gay bar,’ she remarked.
I nodded, gazing glumly into my pint. I’d drunk too much and now felt a bit sick.
Georgia nudged me. ‘There is woman looking at you,’ she said. ‘She is cute, no?’
I glanced behind me. The girl Georgia had pointed out was cute, with dark curly hair. I began talking to her. I can’t remember what about, maybe my studies, or her work—she was a chef at a café on Brunswick Street. An hour later we kissed.
I’d always imagined something would change inside me at that exact moment—fireworks would go off in the background, my confusion would be swept away and everything would be clear and sure. That it would be my Clarissa moment.
But it wasn’t like that at all. I enjoyed the kiss, but I still felt the same detachment. The girl’s lips were cold and soft, and she tasted of beer, as I’m sure I did. It felt more natural than kissing a boy, but only slightly. Then Georgia came over, took my arm. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Time to go home.’
I tried to block out what happened that night in Collingwood. Each time my thoughts strayed to the girl, I felt myself shudder, disgusted and afraid. Apart from Georgia, no one else knew—not Ruby or Marina, and especially none of the other girls from school. I’d been to parties where jokes about lesbians had been volleyed around the crowded room. Rug-munchers. Dykes. Vagitarians. There was always laughter in their voices, but venom too. No one would want to be my friend if they knew I went around kissing girls.
So I made a pact with myself: if I didn’t speak about it, it would remain a half-live thing. If it was a secret, I could control it.
But as the weeks and months passed, something had reawakened in me, something from so long ago I had forgotten it was there, that took me all the way back to when I was a girl at Silver Creek. Some light, some fire. I couldn’t stop thinking about girls—meeting a girl, kissing a girl, holding her in my arms. I wanted to fall in love. I wanted to be loved.
But the fear was still there too, and all the uncertainty that came with it. So it was that the desire for love split me in half. From that night I began to live two lives—one exploring this new and real part of myself; the other an act—until, after a whil
e, I didn’t know which one of me was telling the truth and which one was telling the lies.
There are no hikes this term. Instead we go out on community service, which is weekends of work on nearby farms and wineries, as well as projects around the school, like planting trees and building mud huts. I’m in a group with Simone, Lou and Emma. I’m so relieved I could weep.
Our first community service takes place at the Crawford farm. Mr Crawford is the local vet, and he treats every kind of animal: horses, sheep, cows, dogs. They have a few ponies on their small acreage, and Lou squeals with delight as we spot them grazing beside the drive.
After Mrs Crawford greets us out the front of the house, she leads us around the back to the shed with a barbecue and cleared space for our sleeping bags.
It’s still early in the afternoon, and Emma and I pair up for the first jobs around the property. We muck out the stables and gather up stones in the paddocks so the horses don’t trip and go lame.
We work until dusk. The night falls quick and fast, like a drop cloth. I wash my hands and arms and face at the tap behind the shed, my stomach growling. I can’t wait to put the sausages on to the barbecue—and I’m about to announce to Emma that tonight I plan to break my sausage-and-bread record (eight servings) when Simone bursts into the shed.
‘It’s Lou,’ she gasps. ‘Oh my God . . .’
‘What is it?’ Emma drops the barbecue tongs into the dirt. ‘What’s happened?’
Simone bites her lip. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know if I should say.’
‘Sim,’ I say, ‘you’re scaring us. What’s going on? Where’s Lou?’
Simone gulps down some tears. ‘She tried to hurt herself,’ she finally says. ‘While we were out, doing jobs, she starts getting really sad—crying and everything. She misses her family, and all her animals—and I think being here reminded her of home.’ Simone wipes her nose with her sleeve. ‘Anyway, just as it got dark, she walks away from me, towards a bunch of trees, and then . . . It was so awful . . . She just ran at this tree. Full pelt. She slammed right into it and then fell to the ground.’
Simone is crying in earnest now and Emma and I crowd around her for a hug. Afterwards I go outside to see if I can see Lou, circling the shed calling her name. I feel sick in my guts, like I’ve been punched. When I return, I volunteer to stay in the shed, in case Lou comes back. Emma leaves to find Mrs Crawford, and Simone has disappeared.
I linger by the barbecue, staring at the raw sausages. Simone and Emma have been gone for ages and I start to get scared. What if Lou is dead? What will we do? Then I hear murmuring on the other side of the tin and Simone walks in, Lou behind her. She is covered in dirt, her face bloated from crying.
~
Mrs Crawford ushers the three of us into the lounge room. She hands me the television remote. ‘Watch whatever you like, dear,’ she says. Then she goes down the corridor into another room and closes the door. Through the thin walls I can hear her talking on the telephone. Calling school, I suppose. Lou is somewhere else in the house. ‘She’s a little embarrassed about the whole thing,’ Mrs Crawford had said. ‘Giving us a fright like that.’
I switch on the TV. Australia’s Funniest Home Videos is playing and we stare at the screen for a while. After a clip of a baby falling out of its bassinet, I finally ask, ‘Is Lou okay?’
Simone clears her throat. ‘She’ll be fine. But only if no one else in Red House finds out about this.’
‘What?’
‘You have to promise that you won’t tell anyone. Especially not Portia.’
I look at Simone. She is still straight-backed, and her eyes are glassy in the pink light. Beside her, Emma shifts uncomfortably on the couch. She doesn’t trust me, I realise with a shock.
‘Okay,’ I mumble. ‘I promise.’
‘It’s to protect her,’ Simone says, her voice softer. She extends a hand to me, the black nail polish chipped, but she’s too far away for me to reach.
~
Back at school, I sit on the edge of my bed, waiting for Miss Lacey’s visit. For her to take the three of us aside for a talk, maybe even for a hot chocolate at her house, away from the rest of the house. I sit like this until lights-out and Miss McKinney screams, Get in bed, Starford, or it’s a Stonely Road for you and all.
Miss Lacey doesn’t come the next morning, either. When she wanders over at lunch for a chat with the girls at the other end of the table, she doesn’t even look at Simone and me hardly touching our hamburgers. When Lou returns to school later that afternoon the silence has stretched like a wad of chewing gum.
‘That’s why we have to stick together,’ Simone says bitterly. ‘Because there is no way they’re going to help us.’
I’m angry with Miss Lacey, but I’m also angry with Lou. This anger surprises me; I don’t suppose it is fair. Shouldn’t I blame myself more for what happened? I do feel like a bad friend not to have seen how unhappy she has been. I don’t like feeling guilty—it’s like a wave of white-hot panic.
But the more I think about it, the more opaque it becomes. Trying to make sense of why Lou hurt herself feels like falling into a pit of quicksand. When I was eight or nine years old, a girl from our street gassed herself in her family’s car. She was sixteen. Her brothers went to my primary school, and when they came back after the funeral I expected them to be different. But they weren’t—not on the outside, anyway. They still played footy at recess and ran about laughing on the oval at lunchtime. It was their mother who now moved through our town silently, her face grey and peculiar like she’d never smile again. ‘You’d just never get over it,’ I remember Mum saying. There was something rigid in her voice. And I kept wondering, every time I saw those boys, But what about the girl? Who cares about what she felt?
~
For the next community service we stay with Lou’s grandmother. Her house, which is about an hour from the school, doesn’t have any acreage attached, so there is no real work to do. Instead we ride around the backyard on a four-wheel motorbike and eat hot chips and Mars Bars from the corner store. No one says anything about what happened at the Crawford farm.
I’m surprised when Miss Lacey comes to collect us the next afternoon. Usually it is the assistants’ job. The four of us line up on the verge, watching her park the Jeep. Lou is staying another night here, and when I say goodbye my eyes fill with tears. I’m afraid, even though I know Lou is happy with her grandmother.
She wraps her arms around me and I breathe in her familiar smell of earth and sweat and lavender. ‘It’s okay,’ she murmurs. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘How was your weekend, girls?’ Miss Lacey asks brightly when we’ve all climbed inside the Jeep.
We grunt a reply. Lou stands at the gate beneath a bush of tangled roses. The Jeep starts up with a rumble. Miss Lacey eyes us in the rear-view mirror, smiling.
‘All’s well that ends well, right?’
I meet her gaze, fighting the urge to lean over for a handful of her hair. Why doesn’t she care? Sun blisters across the windscreen and we all wince. I twist in my seat to give Lou a final wave, but she has already gone back inside.
Exeat Weekend is the one weekend each term when we get to go home. From the balcony I watch the girls gambol down the hill towards the buses bound for Melbourne. In only a few hours they’ll be watching television and eating decent food, far away from Silver Creek.
I’m not going home. Instead my parents are coming to me. We’re staying in Riverfield, the small town near the school, in the motel next to the pub.
It’ll be fun, Mum wrote in a letter. We’ll get to explore the area together.
I can’t believe my parents. Why would I want to stay so close to school? Why don’t they understand these kinds of things like other parents do? I stared at the letter until the words blurred. I wanted to scream.
I didn’t, of course. I picked up a lead pencil and wrote back, That sounds nice xx. It’s a game we play now, my parents and me: never saying what we
really think, never thinking what we say.
~
‘Have you heard the one about the crab?’
‘Dad!’
We’re in the pub, empty except for two men at the bar mooching over pints of beer. In the background is a big-screen television playing the football. I had a steak for dinner, with fat chips and mushroom sauce. I wolfed the food down like I hadn’t eaten in weeks, juice dripping from my chin.
‘No?’ Dad grins, sipping at his wine. ‘Well, a man walks into a restaurant and says, “Waiter, do you serve crab?” And the waiter turns to the man and says, “Sir, we serve anyone.”’
Archie glances at me from under his long lashes, chewing on a smile. I laugh, even though I’ve heard the joke a hundred times, and Dad joins in with a rasping chuckle.
Later that night, I snuggle in the narrow bottom bunk. The sheet and quilt are tucked in like a straightjacket and the blanket scratches at my chin. Mum appears out of the gloom, perching on the edge of the bed. I reach out for her warm hand. ‘Good night,’ she says.
The alcove where the bunks are smells like antiseptic. Stretching out, my toes poking from the end of the quilt, I think about what Portia said that morning. She wants us all to bring alcohol back from Exeat. ‘For a party out the back,’ she had said, laughing. ‘Like normal teenagers.’
As everyone else headed to the buses, Portia had stayed with me out on the deck. It hadn’t felt friendly, though, as she leant against the banister, chewing on a Redskin.
‘Don’t forget,’ she said, pointing at me. ‘Bring back whatever you can, I don’t care if it’s Grandma’s sherry. But make sure you have something.’
My chest contracts with panic. Where am I going to find alcohol? Obviously my parents won’t buy it for me, and I can’t nick any from the stash of old liquor bottles under the sink at home. Portia will hate me if I don’t bring anything back, and I’ll lose everyone’s respect. Then I remember the mud-brick huts, down past the hayshed. On community service a few weeks ago I’d seen crates of beer and wine down there—for the assistants, I suppose, who are partying while we’re away. There are bound to be leftovers. I can sneak down when Mum and Dad drop me back to school.
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