Six Bedrooms

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

  ‘Titian hair,’ I said to her. It was our code; it was about possibility. Her long red hair was beautiful, gold when it caught the light. We had built it into our mythology of the future, when she would be discovered by an artist and painted, nude, with her hair falling over her breasts.

  We made our way down to the house. Katie’s parents didn’t seem to be there. No one said hello to us as we came in; we just went to the kitchen. There was orange juice in the fridge. There was music, and kids smoking on the verandah. The moon was higher now, and paler. Sometimes there would be a surge of noise from the cicadas. I poured the rest of the tequila – still nearly half a bottle – into a tall, patterned glass and topped it up with orange juice. I took a huge, burning swallow and passed it to Judy. She took a deep breath, put it to her lips and drank the lot.

  ‘That was for me too!’ I said, but when she’d finished coughing she grinned at me and wiped her lips and eyes.

  ‘Now I’m ready,’ she said.

  We had agreed to part. Judy’s goal I secretly scorned: she was in love with Michael Brown from Year 12, a boy who was legendary for his beauty and kindness, who would probably not even be here. I was in love with him too. You couldn’t not be. He’d once stood up and offered me his seat on the sport bus, when hockey and football were being played at the same ground. The seat was warm when I sat down on it.

  Judy’s goal was to talk to Michael, so that he might remember who she was, wonder about her, choose her, with her Titian hair, to model for his final work for Art. This was the thing about Michael – he played sport like a hero, but always came top in Art and English. After the modelling, he would not be able to get Judy out of his mind. Then he would get a scholarship to a school of art in Paris, and beg her to come with him, not even finishing her HSC. She would go, and they would be so poor in Paris, on a single scholarship, that they would not have much to eat and she would lose a great deal of weight. It was a very satisfactory story, to which I’d contributed quite a lot. We’d come up with the weight-loss part together.

  Judy went out one door of the kitchen and I went out the other. There was a can of beer on the floor outside, which I picked up and shook. It was half full. I peered into it to see if there were any cigarette butts. There were not, so I drank it. It helped with the warm and pleasant feeling I was beginning to have from the tequila. Hearing Raffaello’s voice from outside, I went to find him.

  It was the tequila, undoubtedly. I did something which, years later, still has the power to make me shudder. It was unforgivable, as though I’d learnt nothing in the last four years of high school. I said: ‘Would you go out with me?’

  This wasn’t an invitation to the movies or to see a band. It meant, be my boyfriend. Love me. I don’t think it had ever been said, in the history of North Hills High School, ever, by a girl.

  Before Raffaello could answer, Andrew exploded next to him. I’d seen this performance before. It consisted of laughing so hard he cried. Of smacking his thighs, holding his aching sides, wiping his eyes. Of shouts and screams of laughter. Of gasps and sobs of laughter.

  I was still, suspended in myself, watching, waiting for the thigh-slapping and shrieking to stop. Even Raffaello did nothing. Eventually Andrew fetched back up against the wall of the house, panting, one last wipe of the eyes with the back of the hand, and said to me, ‘You! You think he’ll go out with you?’

  Other kids were looking at us now, though none approached.

  I was still waiting to fall dead on the spot, the effects of the tequila flushing downwards, leaving my head sore and clear.

  ‘I can’t see it,’ said Raffaello, looking at his feet.

  ‘Why not?’ I said. I had nothing left to lose.

  He took a breath, and stared straight at me. ‘We’ve got nothing in common,’ he said, then added, ‘Everyone thinks you’re a lesbian.’

  Andrew was silent now, arms crossed, eyebrows raised. I gave a push with my backside, heaved myself away from the wall. Someone, a girl, was calling me, in a stupid singsong voice that promised insult.

  ‘Tash-a,’ said Katie, as she came round the corner of the house, ‘your friend needs you. She’s spewing.’

  On Thursday afternoons Judy’s mother went to her singing class and Judy came to my house. She was old enough to be left alone, but it had been happening so long, and it suited us both. Friday was the day homework was always due; on Thursdays we sat at the kitchen table, filled ourselves with toast and peanut butter and did our work together, comparing, criticising, helping each other.

  My mother hadn’t been able to castigate me for drunkenness – I was too old to let her get away with that; she knew what the consequences would be – but I’d had to get Judy’s vomit out of the car myself and then pay for it to be cleaned. I used a trowel from the garden and a pair of washing-up gloves. Then I had to look in the yellow pages for the car-cleaning service. It was six weeks’ pocket money.

  And of course my mother was not above making Judy feel terrible. The smell would never go away, she told us, and she was too poor to be thinking about buying another car. She said this while she was looking in the back of the pantry to see if she had forgotten any bottles of wine or Scotch. She was on her hands and knees, moving the tall jars of flour and rice that never got used up. She looked exactly like the woman on top of the bookshelf in the Thurber cartoon.

  ‘Look, Jude,’ I said, nudging her. ‘That’s my first wife over there.’

  Judy looked, and some spit went down the wrong way, and she choked with laughter. My mother glared at us. Of course there were no hidden bottles of Scotch or wine. There had been, but I’d drunk them.

  It didn’t last forever. It was easy to see that no one would ever forget, and if Judy ever made another mistake, if she did something like fart in class or vomit from bus-sickness (which she’d been known to do), we would be back at the beginning again. But she was careful, and so was I.

  It didn’t surprise me when Raffaello moved seats in Maths. I was on my own now, looking out of the window, staring so hard at the eucalypts in the playground that they had silvery edges.

  I was outside English one afternoon, waiting for the teacher, not even thinking about it, thinking about Jane Eyre and her small, plain self, when Andrew ducked up next to me. He had been trying to catch my attention, I realised. It was another performance: he was singing, and now that I was looking at him, I could see that he was singing ‘Like a Virgin’.

  He went on singing, doing little twists in front of me. Other kids were watching us, glad they weren’t the object of Andrew’s attention. I kept still. And the longer I was still, the more it started to look like Andrew was serenading me rather than harassing me, his little dance becoming more and more elaborate. I looked at him, his rodent’s face. I could see his teeth as he sang, and they did not look clean.

  It was a decision, a sudden accession to adulthood. It was like when I’d decided not to see my father. It was absolute power, if I wanted it. It came like so: I was not going to be a success at this, and so I was going to stop trying. I had found a virtue in stillness, in watching – in ceasing, at least for the moment, to care whether or not I was acceptable to others. In this silence, while Andrew’s dance wound down – you could see him considering how to leave, whether it would be better to spin away from me as though I had never been there or come to a stop in front of me – I realised that it was not just me who was a virgin.

  I have looked at a photograph of myself from that time. I see a girl with pale skin and short dark hair, with arms folded over her breasts. I am wearing something else of my father’s, an old painting shirt, and I look pretty, and angry, a lot like my mother. Judy, who is standing next to me, is not so fat as we thought. But we were right about the weight loss, although it was Judy’s own scholarship that took her away, that left her little time or money for food. We are still friends.

  We dress as ourselves now. I wear jeans, and t-shirts. Judy is tall and bosomy and recognisable in public. She wears
old-fashioned dresses with sculpted bodices, long boots that lace up and dark glasses if she is going out. When Judy is in town we sit in cafes together. If my son is on Judy’s lap he will bury his hands in her hair, still streaked with red and gold.

  OTHER ANIMALS

  FERN’S mother died on a cruise. A ferry cruise, a movable party, the sort that patrols the harbour on weekends. No one saw her fall into the water, and no one missed her until the ferry pulled in at the wharf. Then her husband realised she was gone.

  Fern and I had not been friends then. I was moved to her school when I was in fifth class. Fern invited me home after I had spent a week in the wearying company of Lucia Morgan, a girl the size of a grown-up. Lucia was kind-hearted, showing me where the canteen was and sticking with me through the endless lunchtimes. She was as large as my older brothers. She put a heavy arm around my shoulders and called me cute. She noticed – as I never had – that I had a lisp, and in her kind voice used to chant at me, ‘Not thoggy dog, soggy dog.’ Thoggy dog became her nickname for me. Its pointlessness depressed me. There were no dogs in our conversation. I was not a puppy.

  Fern asked me home after I was given the seat next to hers. We asked each other if we had brothers or sisters. She did not say, as most people did, that I must never be lonely. She had only an older brother called John who was at high school in the city. He was not there when we reached Fern’s house, sweating in the late summer sun, our feet grimy in their sandals. There was neither a mother nor a father on that day. There was a nanny, a Russian woman whose name was Anna, with dark, bushy hair and eyebrows. She gave us glasses of Milo after we’d put our bags in the hall, and then Fern took me to her room. In the room was a double bed crowded with stuffed toys and towered over by a stuffed Pink Panther, bigger even than Lucia. Afternoon sun flooded in through an enormous window that looked on to a blue swimming pool, so bright I had to shield my eyes.

  Fern showed me her diary, and a page near the beginning, written nearly two years earlier. It said, Today is the worst day of my life. My mother died.

  ‘There,’ she said, and closed the diary. We looked at each other. I had not thought of a single thing to say.

  ‘Let’s have a swim,’ she said. ‘I’ll lend you one of my cossies.’

  Later, we lay on our stomachs on the edges of the pool, our faces inches apart. I could see the way her hair looked when it was wet – dark underneath the blonde. And the blonde slightly green, like the hair of all the kids who had pools.

  ‘Do you think I have a lisp?’ I said. I watched the water, dripping from my chin, running into the cement cracks between the pebbles.

  ‘Yes,’ said Fern, and I looked up at her. ‘But it’s nice,’ she said. She was frowning at me. Lucia had said the same thing, more or less.

  The speech teacher lived in a house across the bridge that made me think of The Ghost and Mrs Muir; a house like a ship, its crow’s nest an attic from which you could see the river shuffling light, our school, a sailing sky beyond it. Dr Morse showed me everything, as though I had come to buy the place. It was dark, with dark wood in the window frames and the three huge staircases. There were books everywhere, and three little dogs who had exploded like party favours when the front door was opened. And a strange smell. What was the smell? I followed Dr Morse back down the stairs after we had looked through the attic window at the view, and there was one of the dogs, hunched into the letter C on the enormous Persian carpet. Dr Morse let out an exasperated breath, and clicked her tongue as she approached it, and it scurried off. She scooped the shit up with her hand and, calling, ‘Just a minute!’ over her shoulder, was gone through a big swing door into what I knew to be the kitchen.

  There were other piles of shit in the room, behind an armchair, hiding in the pattern of the carpet. Some were drier than others. The smell was not unbearable. Rank, almost sweet. Through the front window I could see my mother, sitting in her car. Everyone else was at home, with my oldest sister in charge.

  Dr Morse taught me to put a t in front of my s’s. This would put an edge on them, like sharpening a knife. She taught me to say my own name. ‘Tsarah,’ she said to me, ‘you’ll be able to forget it soon. You won’t even notice. But for now – Tsarah.’

  At my house there was always someone home who was interested in what you were doing. My mother used to stand on the landing with a plate of biscuits, calling to us to come down and tell her about our day. At Fern’s house it was only Anna, who never left the kitchen. Fern’s house was empty, with no one watching. There was a room under the house that was full of clothes – not hung on racks or in wardrobes, but in collapsing cardboard boxes and strewn across the unmade single bed. There were shoes, and hats and dresses made of sliding material. The pull of that room was powerful, and Fern and I would go on playing dress-ups well into our high school years. It was partly the disorder that made me want to be there. Nothing had been laid out for us. No one had invited us to enjoy the room, which seemed to have no purpose. No one ever looked in. We dressed up and took each other to nightclubs – one of us would go out of the room, close the door and then knock, often surprising the other in her jutting lacy underwear. Sometimes these dates ended with a kind of wrestling on the bed.

  There was this life, and there was the other life that I was living in great privacy. The family up the road who spent a great deal of time away on their property had left me in charge of their animals: a goat, a rabbit, some cats and a dog. I had learnt to deal with the dog which stood barking at you ceaselessly unless you ran at it, whereupon it skipped away and began frisking and playing. The goat, on the other hand, charged you, and I had learnt to go into its pen with my hands out. I caught it by the horns and pushed it back. I kept it off with my foot and hip while I filled its water bowl and pulled more straw out of its bale.

  The rabbit was black, and I named it Beckworth. I imagined it to be a little like Blackavar, the rabbit in Watership Down who survived a beating from fiercer, stronger rabbits. I spent a lot of time kneeling in the pen, holding off the goat, watching the rabbit. Watership Down felt very real to me. If you had seen me you would not have known I was playing. It was mostly keeping still, watching, listening to the sound of quiet. There was no one in the house, no one in the enormous garden. When I was there I was missing from my life. Time passed in shivering waves.

  Fern preferred it at our house and so we sometimes fought over this. She liked my second-oldest brother and he liked her. She liked my mother, who was either talking or cooking, and quite often both at once. My mother was involved, said Fern, implying that this was a good thing.

  Everything I loved about Fern – her long, ropy blonde hair, her brown skin and handsome, strong face – was exaggerated unpleasantly in her brother John. He was all chin and nose and his skin looked dirty. His hair was dirty. Fern’s eyes were a startling blue, but John’s made him look mad, as though he might be blind behind their dazzle. Once, he came home while Fern and I were swimming and stood by the pool in his school uniform, looking down at us.

  ‘Get lost,’ said Fern. She whacked her arm against the water, splashing his legs.

  ‘There’s a funnel-web in the pool,’ he said, pointing. Fern turned round to look. I was sitting on the edge with my legs in the water. I jumped up and ran over. There was something black at the bottom, curled like a leaf. Fern climbed out while John got the scoop and brought the thing to the surface. The second it came out of the water it sprang to attention, front legs raised.

  ‘Kill it!’ screamed Fern.

  John brought the scoop up near Fern’s face, the spider rearing in the net. Fern swung at it and it was sent soaring into the garden, legs splayed. John didn’t seem to be looking at her, or at the spider. His eyes were the same colour as the pool.

  We were fourteen, and lying in the grass with my dog – a gift, as a puppy, from my neighbours – and Fern said, ‘Today is exactly a year since my first sexual experience.’ She gave the dog, panting heavily next to her face, a shove. ‘Get o
ff me. God, he dribbles.’

  The rabbit, Beckworth, had died the year before. Mrs Wilson, at home without her children, who were all at boarding school, found it in the straw and came to get me. She stood struggling with the goat while I knelt by Beckworth’s body, which already had ants coming from its underside. I recited the rabbits’ prayer silently to myself. My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today. Even in my head I added the t in front of the s. Tstopped. A week later Mrs Wilson arrived at our house with a border collie puppy, born on the property to a proper farm dog.

  Did Fern mean actual sex? Or did she mean something else? There were an increasing number of conversations that I was having to store away like unopened presents. By this time we were at high school; mine local, hers north of the city. We rarely had the time to see each other after school, except in summer when it was light till late and we walked the dog. Fern’s father had married the second Mrs Lawrence by now, and they travelled a lot, to medical conferences and universities where Dr Lawrence could teach his revolutionary techniques. Fern was left at home with John and the nanny, Anna.

  This was not long after she had told me that Anna had been having sex with her father and now was having sex with John. ‘She does it with both of them,’ she said. ‘It’s part of her job.’

  The idea that Anna had to do this appealed to me. I was beginning to think that if it were left up to me I would never do it. The act of saying yes would be more than I could manage.

  Fern came at things with the body, willing to experience them before she could understand them or say them. It was possible that her sexual experience might have to do with my brother, who had become something of a legend at our high school. Indeed, I felt bathed in a kind of erotic knowingness myself when he passed by in the playground or at the bus stop, as though by association I might be a legend too. The girls I went to school with became wrecks if invited to my house, shattered and silly, collapsing into giggles if he threw himself down on to the couch with us, or appeared at the door of my room, as he was wont to do. Sometimes Fern stayed on at our house when I went out to walk the dog, or go to swimming training.