‘Let’s go back up,’ I said. ‘We could get drunk.’
‘With those idiots?’ Ben sat down on the bed and patted the mattress next to him. His sheets were new, black and horribly shiny. He smiled at me, and then pursed his lips, a kiss. I shook my head. The inside of his mouth tasted like sandwiches or baked beans.
I crossed my arms tight over my chest. ‘I want to get drunk.’
‘What about Days?’
‘Come on,’ I said and he stared at me, and crossed his own arms.
‘Please.’ If I could get him drunk I could get away, and put off the sex. ‘It’ll be fun.’
Ben gave a long, weary sigh and got to his feet. I was already out the door. He stumped up the stairs behind me. I was running, taking the steps two at a time – I had a feeling, a superstition, that if I reached the kitchen before he got to the top of the stairs I would be free of him. I swung, panting, into the kitchen and Alex and Rob turned to look at me.
‘I want a drink,’ I gasped.
We didn’t go back to school that day. As the afternoon went on I got lighter and lighter. It was my dream, I think, to disappear. The more I drank the less substantial I felt, almost coming apart, like a rag of cloud in a breezy sky. I drank and listened to the boys, and didn’t speak. Once, just once, Alex came to stand next to me. Then he took my hand, and looked down at me, his eyes as startled as mine must have been. Ben didn’t see this. He had given up needling me about getting back to his room and was becoming incoherent, staggering around the kitchen, challenging us to drinking games.
None of them noticed when I took the bottle of champagne I was drinking from and went out into the hall. There was a set of metal spiral stairs leading up a concrete stairwell. The edges of the steps were irregular and the concrete was bare and grey. It was as though the house was not finished, was a shell, and that the family had moved in before it was ready. I started to climb, holding the bottle by the neck. Four floors up and I had reached the single room at the top, which I knew must be Alex’s. From it you could see the Harbour Bridge, shimmering in the distance. The sun was behind us now. A breeze had sprung up. I could feel it on my hot face through the open window, and hear the tink of stays from the moored boats. I was drunk; it was a summer afternoon; there was an opening out, a flood of possibility.
I turned back to the room. In one corner there was a cricket bat, on the desk a pile of folded clothes, on the wall a poster with a picture of a red Porsche. There were no books. I finished the bottle of champagne sitting on Alex’s bed, and then went down the metal stairs as quietly as I could. I grabbed my bag from the hall, let myself out, skipped through the shrieking gate, pressed the button to close it and was up the street and round the corner as fast as I could go, my heart beating quickly.
I walked home, my schoolbag on my back. The leaves on the trees were bright in the glassy air. There was no one around – there was a lull at that hour, when fathers had arrived home from work and mothers were making dinner. Televisions were on in the front rooms of houses. Perhaps it would be autumn soon, after this long, bright summer. When I got home my mother was cooking in the kitchen with the lights off, the twilight rounding the edges so the room was gentle, soft. She turned and smiled at me as I came in.
In Maths on Friday Ben passed me a note that said, How do you like my new big brother?
I read the note and then wrote, He could be worse, and passed it back.
Ben looked, and then covered the note with his hand. I tried to think of something else to write about Alex, but he hadn’t struck me as funny, as most things did when I was with Ben. Our friendship flourished in confinement, like Maths class, where our notes to each other made us sick with laughing and sometimes caused the teacher to send us out. Then we would push each other in the corridor, stagger against the clapboard walls, knees bent with mirth. But today we did our Maths. We did not even pretend to hide our answers from each other, the way we usually did, in imitation of Mary Ann Adams, who would be dux eventually and didn’t want anyone else to share it.
Walking from Maths to History, I told Janice about Alex. She preferred punk boys, skinny ones with stick legs in black jeans and winklepickers, but she understood the appeal of the private school boy. Every girl, even Janice, wanted to be asked to a private school formal where, we believed, some thoughtful parent would arrange for a party beforehand with actual drinks being served, where the boys would not wear pale grey tuxedos with pale blue bowties but proper black ones. Where the boys would be capable, handing us in and out of a taxi, talking to us at the dance instead of getting so slaughtered that they spent most of the night vomiting in the car park. Janice said nothing about Ben.
On the way home from school I walked with Ben as far as his street, allowed him to kiss me and put his tongue in my mouth, and then took the back streets to my house. I liked the quiet, and not having to think about cars when I crossed the road. I could daydream so intensely that reaching home was a surprise; my body had carried me there without me knowing. I told myself a story as I walked, of Alex coming up from the ferry, inexplicably early from his turreted school, liking the back streets as much as I did, meeting me under the arch of leaves. Neither of us would go home. We would choose one of the streets that led down to the river, one that ended in a tiny reserve, we would sit on the bench next to each other and talk and kiss. We would still be there when it was dark.
On Sunday afternoon I was sitting at my desk in my room upstairs, trying to force myself to do my homework. I had a Modern History essay due that week. I knew I’d be able to write it if I could just make myself start, but instead I was fiddling with the radio, trying to find a song that I could put on to the tape I was making. But there was nothing on. I leant over to pick up my bag and take out my history book, and Ben’s slipped out from between its covers. I must have picked it up on Friday afternoon, when we were making the usual rush for the door. He would be sitting down now, just as I was, to write the essay.
Without the textbook, he could write nothing. This is what I told myself. He would need it. I would take it over. The walk would do me good. Probably Alex would not be there; he would be with friends. But he might be there.
It would be a chance to tell Ben that I had given being his girlfriend a try, and did not like it. I had no idea how I was going to do this.
It took me half an hour to get dressed. No shoes, I decided. I was subject to a number of complicated and constantly changing rules about my clothes. The adjustments I made to my cut-off jeans and t-shirt in that half-hour were invisible to the naked eye, but absolutely necessary to me. If I had been asked to walk out of the house any earlier I would have been assailed by panic. I put my thick brown hair in a ponytail and drew eyeliner around my eyes.
I pressed the doorbell next to the electronic gate and stood there, trying not to fiddle with my clothes. I held Ben’s textbook over my stomach. A voice from the little speaker said, ‘Yeah?’ and I said, ‘It’s Rose. I’ve got Ben’s history book.’
There was no answer. The gate shrieked open and I went up to the front door, which swung wide to reveal Alex, also in cut-off jeans and a t-shirt, his blond hair flopping over his face, his feet bare. The lurch in my heart was like being pushed suddenly from behind. I said, ‘I brought Ben’s book. I took it home by accident,’ and Alex said, ‘Come in.’
Most boys, when they saw you, did not change their way of being for you. They were slack-bodied, unresponsive – you could make no difference to them. But Alex was electric. I stepped into the house and a prickly charge went through me, and through him. He stood upright, and seemed to be about to reach for me, when Ben appeared at the top of the hall stairs.
‘I was just looking for that,’ he said, and held his hand out for the book. He jerked his head in the direction of the stairs. ‘Come on, then.’
I looked at Alex. His arm was very close to mine. It was tanned, and his hands were big, like a man’s. Ben said to him, ‘Aren’t you meant to be studying?’
&
nbsp; Alex met my eye and shrugged, and Ben took hold of my arm and led me downstairs to his bedroom. He pulled an extra chair up to his desk and opened the history book. ‘We’ll get a start on it together,’ he said.
That push that I had felt on seeing Alex again – that force behind me, like a hand at my back; this is what impelled me. The glittering, prickling surge in my body. Also the desperate need to be done with this experience, to be on its other side, to be free from the fear of it and the fear that I would never do it. To be free of having to do it with Ben.
Feeling only a thumping in my body, I said to Ben, ‘I need to go to the toilet,’ and left him where he was, sitting at his desk, the history book open in front of him. But I didn’t go to the bathroom on the middle floor, near the kitchen. I went on up the metal stairs, past the enormous living room with its vast, flat leather sofas and its glass-topped table, past the bedroom with the huge Ken Done painting and the en suite glinting in the carpeted distance, up to Alex’s bedroom. I stood at his open door, dazzled by exertion, and when he turned from his desk to look at me, could do nothing but cross my arms, and make a strange sort of face.
‘What were you doing?’ Ben said. ‘You’ve been ages.’ He was taking a Style Council record out of its sleeve. He stared suspiciously at me.
‘Talking to Alex,’ I said. There was a sudden wet slide in my underpants. ‘I couldn’t find the bathroom.’
He put the record on the turntable and lifted the needle on to it. For a second, I closed my eyes. My body was still thumping; shock, and pleasure, in equal measures.
‘You look weird,’ said Ben.
I was nearly late for school on Monday because I had walked there so slowly. An autumnal sparkle was almost visible in the air; the trees rattled in a breeze that was cool around my bare legs. I was not thinking, however; I was not trying to figure out what I might do next. I was simply borne along, like the leaves that blew ahead of me. As I came down the hill towards the school I could hear the headmaster on the megaphone, which meant they would be marking the roll. I slipped in through the back of the crowd of kids and stood next to Ben. I nudged him to say hello, and he moved away.
This was the first sign, if only I had taken account of it. But I was too preoccupied. What would happen now? I didn’t know. My thighs hurt a little. I had hardly slept for thinking of Alex. It was such a pleasure, but not just a pleasure, an achievement: not just in love, but no longer a virgin. The problem I faced in breaking up with Ben – in order to go out with his stepbrother – seemed tiny, easy, as though he would just step aside, give way, when he understood how I felt. Later, when I was ready to tell him. Some part of me really did believe this.
In French, from my seat at the back of the room, I screwed up a little ball of paper and threw it at Ben. He turned round and looked at me. I made a face, a stupid, grinning face, and he shrugged and sighed, and turned away. Then he put up his hand and said to Miss Ryan, ‘Miss, Rose is throwing stuff at me.’
Miss Ryan was used to our small conspiracies. She said, ‘Rose, ça suffit.’
I hoped Ben would turn again and grin at me, to show me he’d won this round, but he didn’t. He was bent uncharacteristically over his work, occasionally looking up to study the board. It was so elaborate that at first I thought he was doing it to make me laugh. I did no French. I didn’t pretend to copy anything down. When I couldn’t get Ben’s attention by humming his most hated song or putting our special French singsong into my answers – Ben loved this, we used to chant at each other ‘Je voudrais une disque de Rrrolling Stones,’ just like the tape – I gave up, and looked out the window. Our French class was in the senior block, high up. You could hear magpies carolling in the trees. The shouts of kids doing PE on the oval sounded innocuous, even comforting, from that distance. But I was beginning to feel frightened.
Maths was when I understood that Alex had told him. Ben was late to class and did not sit at our desk, instead scanning the room and eventually choosing the empty seat next to Anthony Myer. Anthony Myer was Mary Ann Adams’s rival for dux. He covered his work too, and kept his pens in a row in his shirt pocket. At lunch you saw him running for the library, desperate to be first to the school’s only computer, one hand clutching his chest to stop the pens falling out.
I tried not to care. I sat on my own and lined my pens up on the desk in front of me, and did not look Ben’s way. I tried to be brave.
At lunchtime the next day Ben was not sitting with our group. I asked one of the other boys where he was, and he looked at me in an amused sort of way and said, ‘Down on the oval.’
On the oval was the big group, where everyone who could keep afloat in the mainstream sat. I would have sat there myself, if it had been possible. No one would have tried to stop me; not physically. Down there the girls sat among the boys, sometimes on their laps, smoking and laughing and teasing the teachers if they walked by. Ben had occasionally visited there. He was welcome anywhere because he was so funny, so quick to mimic a weakness in a teacher or a student who was ridiculous. He used to do the Anthony Myer sprint, holding his hand over a row of imaginary pens, to howls of laughter.
It was clear that Ben was not going to walk home with me that afternoon. I saw him lingering with a group of boys, glancing in my direction, when I was waiting for him at the gate, but he did not come towards me. I set off on my own.
Our school was at the bottom of a steep hill, which the buses had to labour up. Often they broke down halfway. Nearly always, we walked faster than they could drive, shielding our faces from the billows of exhaust. On this afternoon a bus was caught near the top, its engine howling as the driver tried to force it into a lower gear. As I passed, Marco Giordano and Jonathan Lane blossomed out of the back window like an obscene flower, shouting at me. I stared at them. Marco was moving his fist up and down and rolling his eyes in pretend pleasure; Jonathan bawled, ‘Can you suck my cock, too, Rose?’
I put my head down and walked on, ignoring them. Their voices became incoherent under the roar of the bus. I didn’t look back. My heart was beating very fast. I hadn’t done anything like what they were describing. It had been as much as I could manage to submit to Alex’s weight, to open my legs, to keep still as he moved up and down on top of me.
At home I drew a picture of the dress I would wear to Alex’s formal. I wanted something sleek and tight-fitting around the bust that would burst into a skirt like a poppy at my waist. I had an idea that Alex might lay me down somewhere soft, on the velvet grass of whichever golf club or yacht club was chosen by his school, and push my skirts aside to find that I was not wearing underpants. This was not my own fantasy. I had read this in a book when I was drifting around the house, looking for something to do.
As the weeks went on things got worse at school. If I caught a boy’s eye in class he would immediately loll his tongue out and leer at me. When I was sitting thoughtlessly on a wall, waiting for Janice and Vicky, three girls from our year laughed at me; one of them said, ‘Close your legs, Rose – for once.’ There was sniggering from the benches when we played volleyball. This had me checking my skirt for blood, adjusting my underpants, trying not to turn my back on anyone.
I could not talk to Ben. He dared me to, staring at me during assembly or whenever he had other boys around him. Someone kept ringing our house and gasping down the phone. None of this was so obvious that anyone could do anything about it. Teachers did not notice the attention I was being paid at school, and it always seemed to be me who answered the phone to the gasper. I could not talk to Janice or Vicky about what was happening, because it was too shaming to acknowledge it.
Meanwhile Alex was as strong a presence as if he was really there. I took to walking every afternoon and dreaming him up. He was as vivid as a real boy, appearing by my side, or leaning out of a slowing car to call my name and smile at me: a smile that would pull me to him as though I were a fish on a line. I wanted him very much. I was ready for him again. I could remember the feel of his cheek sliding
down the skin of my neck. When I breathed in I could smell him. But I couldn’t think what to do next. Instead, I waited for him in a hum of stillness, trapped in honey, suspended, unable to move.
I was twenty-two when I saw Alex again. It was in the front room of a shared house, at a party in the inner city. I was cruising at that time, on one of the currents of confidence that occasionally came through during those years, confidence that had to do with minor things: weight loss, a series of compliments, the weather. I had been listening to a friend whose boyfriend had been complicatedly, trickily unfaithful, first with a girl we didn’t know, then with her sister, who was in our circle and had been very helpful during the initial part of the break-up. When my friend finished howling into my dress I felt increased. Bigger. Swelled with love and importance. It was hot, and sweat as well as tears soaked my dress. I stood up and looked around, feeling my dress cling to my body, and then saw Alex, standing in a corner and talking to another boy.
He did not look very different. His clothes were cleaner and plainer than my friends’ – a blue t-shirt, a pair of jeans – which made him look simpler, more stupid, less interesting. But his jeans were the right kind, he was handsome, and I was infinitely adaptable. He still looked like a lovely, strong animal. He’d cut his hair short. It was summer, and his skin looked brown and warm. I took a long swig of the beer I had been holding, but hadn’t been able to drink while my friend wept into my chest, walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder.
He looked around. Surprise – and a kind of terror – lit up his face, but before he could speak I said, ‘Come with me. I want to tell you something.’
He raised his eyebrows at the boy he was talking to, and followed me out the front of the house. Once we were in the dark I turned, took hold of his shirt and kissed him. He responded straightaway. That glittering, that prickling. I slid my hands behind his neck and brought him down to me. Both his hands came up and took hold of my breasts. He backed me further into the shadows, against a fig tree that grew over the path, its cold leaves embracing my body.
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