Invisible Boys

by Holden Sheppard

  As soon as I exit the toilet block, I glance over at the country girls. All three of them are checking me out already – but I haven’t brought out the big guns yet. As they watch, I flick my wet hair back and strip my singlet off, making sure to flex my abs and pecs as I stretch upwards. As I lower the wet singlet, I make a show of wringing it out, giving me a reason to flex the hell out of my biceps and triceps. As I casually walk close to the girls and their utes, I glance up innocently and see the looks I knew I’d get. Girls can sense when a guy is the alpha of his group. And girls like this wouldn’t see a body like mine in the flesh very often.

  ‘Bloody tap,’ I say, grinning at them sheepishly. ‘Sprayed out everywhere.’

  ‘Nice rig, mate,’ says the chick in the blue top.

  That’s my in. I don’t even bother zeroing in on the big-titted one: Blue Top is keen on me, and that’s the only criteria I care about right now.

  I start chatting with her. Girls don’t just like me because I have a good body: I can actually turn the charm on and listen really well when I want to. The stereotype that always gets put out in movies and stuff that guys can’t listen is a load of crap. We don’t listen if there is nothing in it for us. But if it means we could get laid, we will hear every single word you say.

  In the case of Blue Top, I hear and parrot back everything she says. Her name is Jess. She’s seventeen. Her mum got breast cancer and died two years ago, so her and her two sisters help her dad run the farm out near Perenjori. She used to ride horses a lot, mostly with her mum, but since her mum died she prefers going to the speedway. She thinks the later Transformers movies are crap but thinks the original one was heaps good. She doesn’t want to be a farmer forever. She has fantasies of moving to Dongara and setting up her own hairdressing salon; and, to demonstrate her talent, she makes a little plait out of the long front strands of my messy, sun-bleached hair.

  Her hand brushes the back of my neck as she finishes the plait. Her nails run down to my trapezius muscle and I instinctively tense it up.

  It’s time.

  ‘Bit cool, isn’t it?’ I say. Lies, of course. It’s February. It could be midnight and it wouldn’t dip below twenty degrees.

  ‘Uh – that’s what the rug’s for, Einstein,’ Jess says, linking her fingers into mine and leading me to the back of her ute, where the thin mattress and black fleece blanket await.

  The mattress cushions my elbows as we lay face-down. We pretend to watch the movie for a couple of minutes until Jess throws the rug over us. Her friends disperse all of a sudden – their timing is knowing and sly, like corrupt border guards turning a blind eye as a drug lord enters the country.

  Jess shuffles on the mattress and presses into my side, her bare skin smooth and warm against mine. How did she already get her top off without me noticing? What kind of magician is she?

  I know what’s about to happen. I want it to happen. I’ve wanted it my whole life.

  And now that I’m here, I can’t.

  As in, I can’t.

  Old MC Hammer isn’t waking up.

  Jess traces her hand over my back, outlining the muscles of my shoulder blades and circling my shoulders. To stall for time, I start to do the same. She moans softly – but not in a sexy way, more like she’s annoyed, as if to say what the hell are you wasting time touching my back for? Get to work!

  I swallow. My throat is drier than the Southgate sand dunes. I can’t pull her body against the front of mine, or she’ll know I’m not hard yet. Won’t she? I assume girls would notice whether there was a tube of meat pressing against them or not, right?

  I slide my hands over her skin and bring them around to cup her breasts, accidentally dragging the blanket with me and exposing her chest in the process. She’s got smaller tits than Richelle, but her nipples are humongous – like her regular nipples exploded and left a brown blast radius in their wake.

  Jess gracefully slips the rug back over her chest. ‘Come on,’ she urges.

  She has literally no interest in foreplay. That’s weird, right? For a girl, I mean. This is new territory. Richelle always delayed my efforts to get right to the screwing part, and was protective enough of her virginity to know how to fob me off with a hand job. But I get the sense Jess is one of those country girls who lost her virginity in year nine and has been sleeping around ever since.

  Years of experience I don’t have. She must think I’m an idiot. A little boy.

  That fear alone is enough to fire me up. I shift, propping myself up with my elbows either side of Jess, holding my weight off her slender body. I don’t want to crush her. I’m like a human hydrofoil cautiously sailing through shallow waters.

  And then something catches the corner of my eye. Something my body must find more interesting than the seminaked woman underneath me.

  The male lead on the screen has taken his shirt off. He’s got a grizzled, mid-30s, All-American dude look going on. Perfect biceps. Nice big shoulders you could really grab onto. Armpits with a shock of thick black hair. I imagine how it would feel to bury my face in those after he’d had a big workout …

  And, finally, MC Hammer springs to life in my jocks.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Jess quips. ‘You’ve been with a girl before, right?’

  I don’t know what to tell her. My brain is buzzing with confusion. Shutting her up is the only problem I can solve.

  ‘Yeah,’ I grunt, gripping her back and lowering myself down. ‘You ready?’

  This time she sighs. Her eyes flash. ‘Yes, but you’re not. Do you have a condom?’

  I stare at her uselessly. I didn’t think of that. I haven’t even taken my pants off.

  Jess rolls over, jabs her hand into her purse and passes me a little blue square. Suddenly, there is nothing sexual about this at all. I’m terrified she’ll realise I have no idea how to put a condom on: thanks for nothing, Catholic school. I make a big show of yanking my shorts and jocks down to my ankles, turning away in the process, which buys me time to rip the condom packet open and look at the strange, cloudy-clear rubber thing in the palm of my hand. It looks like a tiny, dead jellyfish.

  I unroll it and it actually seems pretty common sense once it’s unfurled. I stick my dick into it and peel the condom down the length of my shaft until the whole thing looks shiny and laminated.

  ‘Come on, Kade,’ Jess says. ‘The movie’s nearly over.’

  I sneak back under the blanket – just in case I put the condom on wrong and she can tell – and perch myself on top of her again. ‘Don’t call me Kade, actually. Call me Hammer.’

  She smirks. ‘One guess why they call you that.’

  I don’t have the heart to tell her it’s nothing to do with smashing box, and everything to do with my surname being Hammersmith. I just wink, and finally press my body weight against her warm skin. I reach down and try to direct myself to the goal, and feel a sudden tingle of resistance and pressure when I finally find it. Jess doesn’t make a sound, but her breath catches in her throat. I start to move up and down, but nothing I’m looking at – not her eyes, or her make-up-less face, or her tits – are working for me.

  I know what’s going to happen, and I resist it. I make myself lock eyes with her as I thrust. I force myself to focus. This is it. I’m having sex. I am inside a woman. My virginity is technically already gone now. It’s kind of a non-event, really.

  Unless you look at the screen, says a voice at the very back of my head. You already know how that would make you feel. Amazing.

  I glance up again at the screen again. The male actor is still shirtless, his muscled arms flexing and straining as he fights another dude. Such a hunk.

  I want him.

  I want him here, in the flesh, spread out on this thin mattress in the back of Jess’ ute. I would hold him down, even though he’s older and bigger than me; outmuscle him to show him I’m the alpha and then pin him to the mattress and put my tongue down his throat and taste him. He’d taste like sweat and beer and beef jerky and
protein and cigarettes and leather. Then I’d work my way down, to his pecs, to those tight, hard, dark nipples – sharp and sexy, nothing like Jess’ mess – and then I’d creep further, down between his legs …

  ‘Ooof!’ Pleasure explodes throughout my body, wiping my mind blank with joy as I finish.

  Better than the best wank. Bliss on earth.

  ‘Really?’ Jess says.

  ‘Sorry.’ I finally stop thrusting.

  ‘Get off,’ she says, drawing the blanket over herself.

  I get up, but it feels more like I’m falling in reverse. I pull my pants back up, not even bothering to take the condom off. ‘Was that good for you?’

  Jess is sitting up, covered in the black fleece rug with her knees drawn up to her knees. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway,’ I say. ‘Catchya round.’

  I jump down from the ute tray. As the bliss in my body sparkles into nothingness, like a shooting star, a new sensation comes over me. A sick, horrible light-headedness. My tongue is dry. My lungs don’t seem to be able to draw any oxygen in. Something’s wrong with me.

  My heart is racing – and it’s not in a good way, like when I come off the footy field. It feels like it’s forgotten how to slow down. I feel like my body is about to blow up and I can’t stop it.

  I race back into the toilet block and turn the tap on again, splashing water on my face. It’s cool, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. My face is so hot it’s like fighting a forest fire with a watering can. And it doesn’t slow my heart down. Or get any air into my lungs. Why can’t I breathe?

  ‘Hammer,’ a voice says. ‘You okay?’

  I didn’t even notice there was anyone already in here. Zeke Calogero is standing at the basin beside me.

  ‘Zeke,’ I cry, my lungs stinging. There’s something growing in my throat. Am I having an allergic reaction to something? ‘Help me.’

  ‘You look really pale,’ he says. He doesn’t look urgent enough. Doesn’t he understand what’s happening here?

  ‘Something’s wrong with me,’ I gasp, as the balloon in my throat swells. ‘I don’t want this. Please. I don’t.’

  Zeke’s eyes bulge. ‘Hammer, calm down. What are you on about?’

  ‘Mate,’ I say. ‘I think I’m dying.’

  The hospital in Dongara looks more like a big grey house than a hospital. A young nurse admits me, then a senior nurse, big-boned and no-nonsense, comes to settle me down, check my blood pressure and stick electrodes all over my chest. The doctor is apparently busy with the handful of other patients they have, so they leave me most of the night in a beige hospital bed that looks like it rolled right out of the 60s. Doug nods in and out of sleep on the plastic chair next to my bed. He barely sleeps more than twenty minutes at a time before jerking his head up.

  I know this because I don’t sleep a single second all night.

  Around five am, the doctor checks me over and tells me there’s nothing wrong with me. He says I had a panic attack. I can’t bear to look at Doug’s face when he says that.

  They discharge me just before the sun comes up. When me and Doug walk out to his ute, I tell him, ‘It wasn’t a panic attack. I took a pinga from that chick I hooked up with. I just didn’t wanna get in the shit with the cops.’

  The lie makes Doug look relieved. I wish I could feel that relief.

  Doug drives us back to Greenough – and then a little past the turnoff to our estate, towards the servo on the highway. ‘Need smokes,’ he mutters.

  I stare emptily at the yellow canola fields as we pass them. All I can think about is why Charlie Roth made me so angry before.

  And I realise how much of an idiot I’ve been.

  I was nine, I think, when I first got that excited feeling in my guts. Me and Doug were watching X-Men and I couldn’t take my eyes off Hugh Jackman’s arms. Massive, reddish-brown biceps, bulging, shiny. That singlet. That belt buckle over dirty jeans.

  And I didn’t know what it was then. I just remember telling everyone at school Wolverine was my favourite of the X-Men.

  And when I was about twelve, that was when I woke up with my Ninja Turtles boxer shorts all sticky and a massive grin on my face. I’d been dreaming about playing footy with some of the big players at the time – always the guys with big arms. Dreaming about heading into the showers with them after winning a game …

  Just after my thirteenth birthday, I asked Dad about what was going on with my boxers at night. I already had some idea, but I wanted to really get it. I asked Dad while he was watching the footy, which was a mistake. He told me to talk to Mum instead. She went bright pink and told me she’d answer me tomorrow.

  The next day when I came home from school, there was a thin, square-shaped book on my pillow called What’s Happening to My Body? I’d pushed it under the pillow, locked the door so Doug couldn’t burst in, then retrieved the book again, clutched it in my sweaty hands, and read it from cover to cover. It was published in the 80s and had mostly cartoon drawings of body parts. It talked about everything from pimples to penis size to aggression to masturbation.

  But the part that interested me most was a little passage about something called homosexuality:

  Some people going through puberty may experience surges of hormones which can result in some confusion. Some adolescents may experience some incidental attraction to members of the same sex. This is natural. It is often a phase and will usually pass in time.

  And I’d believed every word. Why wouldn’t I?

  Because of that damn book, I’d never even thought twice about why I got hard when I thought about men. This is natural. I’d spent the last three years thinking it was perfectly normal to be into men’s bodies, because it was just hormones. I mean, I’m into chicks enough, but I don’t check them out unless someone else points them out first. They never pop up in my wanking fantasies, either. And if they do, they’re like cameo appearances on an all-male sitcom.

  But I always figured that, eventually, I’d get a surge of the normal hormones. I always hoped to wake up one day with a sudden, raging, red-blooded appetite for boobs and pussy.

  I pull my smartphone from my pocket. There’s still a trace of signal. I shift in my seat so Doug can’t see the screen, then google every combination of the words ‘gay’ ‘puberty’ ‘phase’ and ‘teenager’ you can imagine.

  The first few websites don’t give me what I want, but eventually I find one that says what I was hoping to hear. Being gay could just be a phase. I might still be straight. I just have to ride it out and not act on it.

  ‘Easy as,’ I tell myself. ‘It’s just a phase.’

  I switch my phone off and stare out the window at the fields. My guts are knotting tighter by the minute. I see a break in the canola ahead and peer at it. There’s just this enormous blanket of nearly unbroken sunny yellow as far as the eye can see, field after field, then this one little patch of purple has appeared out of nowhere. Lupins, I think. Wild lupins. I’ve never noticed them before. Are they new weeds, or have they been there the whole time and I just never looked hard enough?

  Either way, they ruin the whole damn thing.

  10: Bello

  Zeke

  I’m not a good Catholic boy after all, because I cannot for the life of me remember what you’re meant to say when you kneel down for confession. ‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned’ comes to mind, but is that just because I’ve seen it in all the movies? I always thought there was something else we had to say. Something about never sinning again in future. I swear I haven’t actually done this since we did our first reconciliation in year three.

  The wooden door on the other side of the webbed screen clicks shut, and a panel separating us slides open. Father Mulroney is in the house. He makes a squelching noise with his mouth, like he’s moistening it, about to say something, but then pauses, waits for me.

  ‘Forgive me, Father,’ I say quickly. ‘Uh. For I have sinned?’

  God I hope that’s right, o
therwise he’s going to ream me for that, too.

  Father Mulroney clears his throat. Waiting for me. Did I get it right? Shouldn’t he say something? Do I just start? Man, I wish I remembered how to do this properly.

  ‘Do I just start telling you –’

  Father Mulroney clicks his tongue. ‘In the name of …’

  ‘Oh, right. Sorry. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit …’

  Silence again.

  ‘Amen?’ I venture.

  His sigh is almost inaudible, but it’s there. ‘How long has it been since your last confession?’

  ‘So long,’ I confess. That one actually feels good to get off my chest. ‘You can tell, hey?’

  ‘Hm,’ he says. ‘Go on.’

  A blanket of silence cloaks us. I thought it was stupid, coming to a priest to confess my non-existent sins, but actually being here is harder than I’d anticipated.

  ‘I guess I just wanted to confess, um, like I’ve been …’

  I trail off. If anyone from school could hear this, I’d be roasted to a crisp, like good old Saint Lawrence.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Uh. Wanking.’

  He clears his throat again. This man must have the most unobstructed esophagus in history.

  ‘You mean … masturbation?’ he says with gravity, like I just told him I massacred some children.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I see. And how often has this been happening?’

  Oh, like Jesus wants to know about that! The truth is two or three times a day, but I feel like that would make me sound like an unhinged sex maniac, especially to a guy who allegedly hasn’t touched himself or anyone else (let’s hope) for sixty years.

  ‘Once or twice a week, I guess.’

  Father Mulroney hmmms and mmmms like a doctor doing a thorough check-up on a patient. His air of forced seriousness is his stethoscope. ‘Has any of this behaviour involved … pornography?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has any of this pornography been violent in nature?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Just normal stuff.’ Why would he even go there?