Six Bedrooms

by Tegan Bennett Daylight

  In London I couldn’t see how anyone, even a nice, shy, terrified boy who couldn’t get anyone else, would be attracted to me. All the young women I saw were softly beautiful, smooth as doves, or if not beautiful, finished somehow. Like Emma, with her Mary Quant coat and knee-high boots. And she was warm, while I was shivering in my bomber jacket and short skirt. Even the few punks still left in 1986 were perfectly made up, their red or blue hair smoothed into mohawks, their clothes shiny and black and convincingly studded. Nobody that I saw looked messy, the way I did, unless it was Karen and Ruth, with their creaking leather jackets and their weary, mascaraed eyes. I knew that somewhere there were men who appreciated girls like me; girls with clear white skin and round cheeks and big white boobs and slutty, grubby hair. But men; not boys. And I was not ready for that yet.

  We’d been told that it would rain often in London, but I hadn’t thought about the kind of rain it would be. I was used to rain or no rain: a tropical torrent that swept up out of nowhere, or days of incessant sunshine that crisped the parks and made the pavements burn your bare feet. In London it just rained, greyly, endlessly, like a weepy friend, always sorry for herself. I bought umbrellas but I was always forgetting them on the tube and having to walk home with my head down, my dyed hair leaking red down my neck.

  One Thursday evening I got home, dripping, and Emma wasn’t there. Usually on Thursdays she finished half an hour before I did and would be cooking, the lights of the flat turned on to make a yellow box of warmth. As I switched the hall light on, the phone rang. I walked down to the kitchen and picked it up, looking out at the river of headlights on Vauxhall Bridge Road. It was Rory, who I had seen only twenty minutes before, buttoning himself into his long raincoat as we stood waiting for the lift. He wanted to know if I would go out to dinner with him.

  How to describe the cold despair I felt on hearing those words? It was enough to endure that I had not made a success of living in London. This was the worst – this was not just lack of success, it was anti-success, the most wretched of failures. Rory must have recognised something in me, something that echoed inside his own miserable heart. He must have thought I was so desperate that I would say yes.

  When I’d said no, unhappily fabricating a jealous Australian boyfriend, knowing that Rory didn’t believe me, I put the phone down, and almost immediately it rang again. It was Emma. She was having dinner with Jerome, and if I was sure it was okay, she would stay at his house. I nearly laughed. I said it was fine and put the phone down again. I switched the kitchen light on, and then, walking out into the sitting room, the lamps, and the television. All this luxury. At home I’d been living in a terrace house with nearly a dozen tiny bedrooms. Mine had been small and damp, but there was always the sound of someone on the stairs or in the kitchen. I looked out at the traffic and the bright lights of the off-licence, and the people coming up from the tube entrance, and pulled the curtains shut.

  I will always love you. That was what the last page of Peter’s last letter said. I’d taken it out of the envelope, which had already been ripped open, and read it. It was a letter like a suicide note, only he wasn’t committing suicide but quitting commerce to join the defence forces. Finally he would realise his dream of becoming a pilot.

  I left it on the kitchen counter. It wasn’t deliberate; the microwave beeped. My tinned soup was ready, and I forgot to put the letter back in the envelope. Top of the Pops was on, which I always had to watch through splayed fingers. Then I rang a friend at home and we talked until I could tell her about Rory, tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes as I laughed. I went to bed and slept heavily, without needing to be aware of Emma beside me.

  Next morning I was in the storeroom, kneeling on the floor beside the overstock shelves, with a book open on my lap. I’d just unpacked a box of children’s classics and I was reading The Magic Faraway Tree.

  I didn’t hear him approaching, just felt, suddenly, a warm hand cradling the back of my head, the way a mother does a baby’s. I looked up, startled. It was the floor manager, Tony. He smiled at me, and said in his soft London voice, ‘All right, trouble?’

  Behind him I saw Rory, hands on his hips, glaring at me. I flushed, and smiled up at Tony, and nodded. He nodded back, took his hand away, and left.

  I could see that Emma was home as I crossed the road from the tube that evening. Our kitchen light was on. There was someone with her; Jerome, no doubt. I took my time scraping my feet on the metal doormat at the entrance to our building. It had been a long day; Rory was not talking to me, which was more tiring than I could have thought possible.

  They hadn’t been there long. As I shut the door I heard the squeal of a wooden stool on the tiled floor, the sound of the fridge opening.

  ‘Hello,’ I called. I stopped to look at myself in the bathroom mirror, seizing a towel to rub over my hair. Some of the red came off on the towel. The back of my head still felt warm where Tony had touched it.

  When I came into the kitchen Jerome was reading Peter’s letter, one long arm outstretched to hold Emma off.

  ‘It’s private!’ she was saying.

  I put my bag on the floor. They didn’t notice me.

  ‘Give it back!’ said Emma. She was making surprising headway, given her size; Jerome had to brace himself against the bench with one foot to stop himself falling off the stool. Then he simply took his hand away, and Emma cannoned into him. She snatched the letter and stood back, panting.

  ‘I thought you’d finished with him,’ said Jerome, crossing his arms. He said wiv.

  ‘I couldn’t finish with him,’ said Emma. ‘I never started.’ She put one hand to her chest, as if feeling her trotting heartbeat.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘It was unrequited love.’

  They both turned to look at me.

  ‘Whose love?’ said Jerome. ‘Whose love was unrequited?’

  He was so beautiful. He was wearing a green scarf, high around his face. You could see the green in his dark eyes. His skin would be smooth to the touch.

  ‘Peter’s love,’ I said. ‘He’s had a crush on Emma for years.’

  ‘So why hasn’t she put a stop to it? Why hasn’t he given up?’

  I glanced at Emma. She had become very still, though tears gleamed in her eyes. I shrugged.

  ‘Were you sleeping with him?’ said Jerome to Emma.

  I felt my body glittering with embarrassment.

  ‘Of course not,’ said Emma.

  ‘You’re lying,’ said Jerome.

  ‘Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot,’ I said, suddenly impatient with him. This is why I don’t have a boyfriend, I thought. Jerome was not beautiful at all. His face was rigid with anger, his lips pinched righteously together. What a waste of time, all this to-and-fro, this fighting over nothing. I picked my bag up again. ‘I’m going out.’

  I had already planned to meet Karen; we were going to see another band. I forgot my umbrella again; I ran across the road in the rain, through a clot of cars, and went into the off-licence. I called her on the payphone and asked her to come straightaway. I put more lipstick on, looking at myself in the door of the fridge, and bought a four-pack of tall, strong beers. I waited for Karen in the doorway and drank one of the beers. A double-decker bus trundled round the corner, Karen leant out of a top window and shrieked my name, and I made a run for it, half-blinded by rain.

  I climbed to the top floor, my beers banging against my leg. You were allowed to smoke upstairs. Karen lit a cigarette as I sat down beside her. She was smoking Silk Cut.

  ‘If it rains again tomorrow,’ said Karen, ‘I’m going to kill everyone in London with an axe.’

  ‘You’ll be tired,’ I said, staring through the rain-streaked window at the crowds forcing their way along the pavement.

  ‘It’s a big job,’ she agreed, exhaling smoke.

  We both started to laugh at the idea of her wearily hacking her way through the populace. It was so hopeless. We were having such a terrible time. We hated London, a
nd ourselves. I leant my forehead against the seat in front of me, and laughed until I was weeping with it.

  ‘Forget the band,’ said Karen, when we had wiped our eyes. ‘Let’s just go and get drunk.’

  When I got home the flat was quiet. The kitchen light had been left on. I padded, swaying, down the hall carpet to our bedroom. Jerome and Emma were asleep in her single bed. He lay behind her with his knees bent up behind hers, as though they were one shape. I pulled the covers off my bed and dragged them down the hall to sleep on the couch.

  We didn’t get any more letters from Peter, and Emma didn’t mention him, or the fight with Jerome. She had successfully sealed that rupture in the smooth surface of her existence, sealed it so that nothing about Peter and his unhappiness could leak into the rest of her life. We were sisters, Emma and I, which meant we were the same, even though so different. I knew what she was doing, and even wished for some of her strength, her separateness. I understood how important it was for her to keep herself apart from people like Peter, who made a mess of things, who spoiled love with their silliness.

  I understood, too, that I would always have something to do with the Peters, that awkwardness and trouble would always follow me, because awkwardness and trouble are a part of being alive.

  Still, I didn’t want Peter, and I didn’t want Rory, but I didn’t want Jerome either, for all his beauty. I wanted Tony, who’d put his hand on me gently, lovingly. Who’d smiled at me in the Food Hall. Who’d spoken to me with his body, without needing to be grandiose, without desperation, without the kind of anger that so often mars a man’s attraction to a woman. But I still wasn’t ready for him. I smiled and blushed whenever I passed him, and once he winked at me over the shoulder of Annabelle, who managed the bridal registry, but we didn’t speak. I wasn’t even sure that he knew my name. What he’d done probably meant nothing to him – it was an unconscious gesture, a small comfort, a way of avoiding conversation. But none of that mattered: he had touched me, kindly, and the relaxing it had brought about in my body would go on for a long while.

  THEY FUCK YOU UP

  TALK back, said the note on the fridge, $5. Touch my stuff – $10. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between Evan’s writing and their father’s. This one was Evan’s. If he caught you he always made you pay up. Darcy had seen him standing over their mother as she searched her purse for money; she was always violating his commandments, or their father’s. Darcy was as careful as he could be; he was saving up and could not spare five dollars. Although sometimes it could not be helped, if Evan decided something was his at the last minute (the DVD player, for instance; the toaster), or his father made up a new rule and forgot to post it somewhere in the kitchen.

  Evan had left home a week ago. It wasn’t a surprise; Darcy didn’t know why he’d taken so long about it. He’d been at TAFE nearly a year. It was over a fight at the dinner table, when Evan got a text from his girlfriend Karina. About fifteen hundred times they had been told not to bring their phones to the table. Evan had already texted back once, as their mother was serving. Then again, as they started to eat. When their father shouted about it Evan pretended he wasn’t there. It was something to see: Evan staring down at his phone, thumbs working, while their father stood above him, screaming, spit coming out of his mouth. Then Evan had said, ‘What are you going to do, Dad? Put me on detention?’ and he got a crack on the side of the head so hard he fell off his chair.

  After that it was mayhem: their mother screaming at their father, their father yelling at Evan to get up, Evan screaming ‘Fuck you! Fuck you!’ from the floor, scrabbling for his phone. Darcy picked up his plate and took it upstairs to his room, sat on his bed and ate his dinner with the door shut and locked. Evan was gone by the time he’d finished eating.

  Once he’d been sitting on the train, his head against the window, going past the oval in Emu Plains, and he’d seen a couple, a boy and a girl, sitting on the grass out near the goalposts. The girl was enclosed in the boy’s knees. They were facing each other. He’d known straight away it was Evan and Karina. He turned his head to try to see them as they slipped past. He could feel his whole body reaching out to them. That was what he wanted – just him and a girl, away from everyone, showing how they didn’t care, showing how they loved each other out there in that desert of grass.

  He’d been going out with Noor for ten weeks now. She was kind; that was what he liked about her. His mother still had the energy, sometimes, for kindness, and so he knew it when he saw it. Noor was beautiful too. She had thick black hair that smelt like flowers and grew downy on her face and neck. She sat a few desks in front of Darcy in Modern History.

  Actually, they’d been at school together for nearly six years and he’d never really noticed her before. He couldn’t tell her, but the reason he’d asked her out was because of a dream. He’d dreamt about her, that was all – and then the next time he saw her, standing in assembly with her friends, not looking at him, he felt a charge, a rush that didn’t go away. It hadn’t taken him long to get her to go out with him. Nerds like her didn’t have a whole lot of choice. In Modern History he dropped a book to make her turn round, and she did, catching his eye and smiling. It was like someone had flipped up a blind in a dark room.

  He took out his list, which he’d had laminated. He’d stolen a whiteboard pen from his father so he could make marks on it – add things, cross things off as they were packed. His mother had not noticed how little underwear he was running on. In fact sometimes he had to take a pair out of his bag, wear it, see it through the wash and re-pack it. He hadn’t had a swim for weeks because he’d packed his board shorts and he didn’t want to forget them.

  He didn’t know how ready Noor was. She tended to go quiet when he talked about their plan. Once, in the early days, when she was a lot more likely to say unnecessary, hurtful things, she said, ‘How are we ever going to survive without our parents?’

  It had been easy to bring her round – he’d just had to tell her that was it, they were breaking up. That he couldn’t take that kind of disloyalty. They were sitting on the rocks at the edge of the oval, where couples went to talk or kids went to smoke. She’d ended up pleading with him, pulling at his arm. He’d got a full apology out of her, and then – only then – he’d forgiven her, and she’d cried with relief. And promised to go along with the plan, even helped him think of things to put on the list.

  But now she seemed less certain. If he pressed her she totally went along with it, but she didn’t have any new ideas. He put it down to the exams. Noor was a brain, and was planning to be a doctor like her father. The marks you had to get were ridiculous. You couldn’t do it without going a bit crazy.

  ‘Mister Moore,’ came a voice, and Darcy hurriedly slid his list inside his art folder. But it was too late. Everyone was on edge; it was the exams. Mr Gardner told him to get out, so Darcy did. He stood up and pushed his desk away from him, letting his folder, his books, his pens, all slide on to the floor. Mr Gardner shouted at him to pick that up but Darcy ignored him. Three more weeks and he would have no power anymore. Darcy could tell him to fuck off and there’d be no consequences.

  He stepped into the blinding wedge of sun at the doorway, and then to one side so Mr Gardner couldn’t see him, one hand shading his eyes. The art room was two floors up, in the senior block. He leant over the railings, let his eyes adjust, filled his mouth with spit and let it drop till it hit the ground in the courtyard below. He could hear his father shouting down in the science labs, the clatter as someone’s stool was knocked over, the whole class laughing.

  Noor had Physics now, in the lab below, next to his father’s – double Physics, while he had double Art. Then home time. He’d started catching her bus and then walking the kilometre across the park to get to his own house. He wondered if she’d thought any more about buying a sleeping bag, or asking for one for Christmas.

  She was acting a bit weirdly at the moment, he had to admit it. Not just because of the exa
ms.

  Noor did not want to have sex yet, which was lucky, because Darcy didn’t either. Not quite right; he wanted to, and thought about it endlessly when he was alone, but with Noor there it was something different. One year in primary school, which one he couldn’t remember, they’d been given little magnets to play with. The teacher showed them how if you faced the positive and negative ends to each other they snapped together instantly. But if you turned one around you could feel the resistance – the little field about their ends so they seemed to grapple with air. The resistance was just what he felt with Noor when they were alone. He didn’t mind them touching at school because they could only go so far – but if they tried anything more when they were alone it made him shivery with something that felt like anger. He felt pushed and forced and furious, and he had to take deep breaths and not meet Noor’s eye until it had passed.

  Still, it would happen eventually, presumably before they got married, maybe even before they started uni. When they moved out. When her father was out of the way.

  Fathers were useless. They were either unspeakable bastards, like his own and Noor’s, or limp idiots like Jacob Watson’s, who drove Jacob and Darcy to the movies and waved stupidly from the car as they waited to buy tickets. Darcy wished his father dead, he didn’t care how. He was not interested in the scenario, spent no time inventing grisly fates. He just wanted him cold and dead and gone. There was no one who would miss him.

  Noor’s father he hadn’t actually met, or spoken to – Darcy never called their landline. But he was a classic Middle Eastern dad. Noor wasn’t allowed to do anything at night: she was never at parties, and she’d never come to any of the school camps. She wasn’t allowed to go on Facebook. If her phone was switched off she was completely isolated – cut off from everything. Noor was afraid to tell him some of the stuff her dad did: Darcy could see that. She’d hinted at violence. Her dad yelled at her if her music was too loud, and slammed the doors when he was angry so that the ornaments fell off the mantel-piece. Her mother didn’t have a job and her older sister, at nineteen, was already engaged. All Noor did was study and cook and meet her friends at Penrith Plaza. Darcy liked to intercept her there, pretend he had to buy new jeans or something. You could find her just by turning up at the food court. Eventually Jordan Dokic would steer the whole gang of them towards Macca’s and they’d settle there, sitting against the high plate glass windows with the view of the car park, stuffing themselves.