by Sally Piper
How much those heart scars were shared was proved when a group of them went camping one weekend. They’d finished school about six months earlier. Lisa brought her new boyfriend along – a guy she claimed to be super keen on – and a friend of his, who Samantha had only met once before. The guy Samantha had been going out with for three months had just dumped her, so her confidence was bruised.
The boys brought a bag of marijuana with them. Before long a thick joint was passed around. She’d smoked pot a couple of times before, but this was stronger than she was used to. By the time a second joint made a circuit, her confidence was restored. She no longer cared what others saw when they looked at her. She stopped thinking about holding her stomach in. She stopped laughing small. She pushed her hair off her chest so that it no longer hid her full breasts. She relaxed back and felt beautiful and equal.
After a while Lisa and her boyfriend moved off to their tent, giggling and pawing at one another as they went.
The other boy got up from his camping chair and walked over to where Samantha and Nicole sat on a picnic rug. He mimicked a truck reversing as he pushed his butt backwards to sit between them. Bip. Bip. Bip. Nicole’s laugh was controlled. Samantha fell about giggling, which escalated when he landed with an unsteady thud and fell backwards.
‘Whoops-a-daisy,’ he said, which made her giggle more.
Samantha and Nicole each took one of his arms and hauled him back up again. He sat between them then, Samantha under his right arm, Nicole under his left.
‘My girls,’ he said and squeezed them closer.
His breath smelt of beer, his clothes and hair of wood smoke. Samantha thinks he was trying for the hippy look in his baggy, colourful cotton trousers and dashiki shirt, his long hair pushed up under a beanie. The beanie was beige though, so the look was more home-knitted dag than Rasta.
She liked that he called her his girl. She also liked that he kept his arm round her. She doesn’t think Nicole did though. She wriggled out from under it and put some space between them on the rug.
‘It’s getting late, Sam,’ Nicole said, her voice sober and lucid. ‘We should go to bed.’
Samantha was to share a tent with Nicole.
‘Soon.’ Samantha still liked the sensation of floating under his arm.
‘Well, I’m going,’ Nicole said. ‘Why don’t you come too?’
‘All three of us?’ the boy asked and Samantha giggled along with him.
Nicole got up from the rug. She paused a moment and looked at Samantha. ‘You sure?’
‘Aw, come on beautiful,’ he said and patted the rug beside him.
Samantha stayed where she was, even though he didn’t call her beautiful. Even when he said, ‘I always scare the pretty ones off,’ as Nicole walked to the tent.
He pulled her tighter against him. She decided he smelt more like sandalwood than wood smoke. And his daggy beanie had slipped to the side when he toppled, releasing his long sandy-coloured hair. It was surprisingly soft where she expected greasy cords.
In her stoned and trippy state, she became attuned to the bush around her. She believed she could hear the zigzag movement of lizards’ spines as they scuttled through the undergrowth. The gnawing jaws of white ants as they worked through wood. The nudging nub of sightless worms as they pushed through soil. But before long her drug-induced confidence gave way to doubt again and she saw herself as grotesquely large compared to these delicate creatures. An ungainly blot on an otherwise perfectly integrated landscape.
She looked up and saw a possum staring down at her from a branch above. This she remembers as real. Its eyes were spookily red. Its tail was thick and twitched left and right, left and right, like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. Then, irrationally, she believed she could read the possum’s mind. Last choice, it was thinking. Leftovers. She remembers hoping the boy couldn’t read its mind as well.
She also hoped when he kissed her that it was because he desired her. That she had been chosen.
The sex was rough and selfish. The ground hard against her tailbone. Her stoned brain worried for the worms under her back. Worried that their burrows would collapse under the weight of her and the poor blind things would be crushed.
Then, as the marijuana fug started to clear, she saw what was happening for what it was: an opportunistic fuck for someone who neither knew nor cared for her.
‘No. I don’t want to.’ She tried to scramble out from under him.
‘Bit late for no.’ He took each of her hands in his and pinned them to the ground above her head.
She turned her head away, unable to look at that heaving, breathing face above her. His long hair hit against her skin like rain.
She asked herself: Is this rape? Am I being raped?
‘No. No. No,’ she chanted in time to his thrusts. She wanted to believe that she was experiencing the consequences of a bad choice. She compared it to choosing a new flavoured ice cream – an exotic one – that disappointed. But then this silly stoner thought made her laugh.
He pounded her tailbone harder into the ground.
He eventually came with a grunt and a shudder and immediately rolled off her.
‘You’re crazy,’ he said as he pulled up his hippy trousers.
Samantha pulled her skirt down, fumbled round till she found her knickers. She clambered out of the tent and felt his cum run down her thighs.
She went to the tent she was to share with Nicole and unzipped the front closure. She was crying by then and Nicole immediately sat up.
Samantha told her what happened and Nicole put her arms round her till she felt safe.
She lay awake for the rest of the night, sullied and ashamed. She worried about how she was going to show herself in a different light the next morning. Someone who wasn’t an easy, leftover slut. She decided she couldn’t. So at dawn she woke Nicole and told her she wanted to leave.
Lisa left too, of course. Their friendship was impossible to splinter back then. She hoped her departure looked like a statement of disgust to the too-late-to-say-no guy. But in truth she knew she was a coward. She ran away from her shame and he probably didn’t even care that she’d gone.
Samantha imagined him retelling the story to Lisa’s boyfriend. Probably called her a tease. Said the fat ones should be grateful, like he’d done her a favour. She imagined he laughed about having taken one for the team.
Lisa split with her boyfriend two days later. She told him nobody treated her friends like that, and she wouldn’t go out with anyone who hung out with a fucked-up creep who did.
Samantha expects it was this solidarity between them that made her and Nicole step over the man’s shit that day and follow Lisa. Even though her stomach twisted with worry, and the weight of her pack suddenly seemed to double, like it wanted to drag her down, make her buckle under it so she couldn’t go on.
And then it was too late for any one of them to make a different choice. Too late to say no. Because soon enough they reached the point on the circuit where it was as far for them to go back as it was to continue on.
They also reached the point where they lost orientation of where he might be. Was he near or far? Ahead or behind? Above or below? But by then he seemed to be everywhere anyway, so what did it matter?
The heat takes hold of Samantha as tightly as humiliation. It is all-encompassing, refuses to let go. There’s no relief even from the gentle breeze that came up earlier. The wind puffs its cheeks but the air it blows is hot and dry. Her T-shirt is soaked through once more. A constant trickle of sweat runs down the sides of her face, between her breasts, the crack of her arse. She itches with the tickle of it. She expects she smells like a horse.
The natural padding across her shoulders and hips has some advantages though. This morning she noticed red marks across Lisa’s collarbones, saw the way she grimaced when she hoisted her pack on. No such complaints
from Samantha. Her complaints are reserved for muscles alone. And what they tell her mostly is that they’ve had enough, that they want to take her home. She tries not to give much attention to the ache and burn in them. Instead, she marches her legs on – one step, two step, three step, four – like an automaton.
She focuses on the landscape to take her mind off the pain. She notices the way the mountains become bluer as they push upward, how the outline of the eucalypts that rise with them lack clarity; their edges blurred by the fumes of their own breath. How the gum flowers – perfect circles of cream-coloured filaments – spill across the ground. They make her think of the fallen skirts of May Gibbs’s gumnut babies. A childish thought, one born of a mother of three once small boys, but it’s a soothing image, and one that distracts.
And she notices the birds. The creaking-hinge call of bold yellow-tailed cockatoos and the more elusive wattlebirds, whose song sounds more like a warning to be careful. There are dainty-legged fantails and wagtails and restless red-throated mistletoe birds. Those that don’t flee as she approaches skitter and flit from branch to branch, brave in their swift agility. As are the small brown lizards that scuttle across the trail in front of her. Samantha feels cumbrous compared to these delicate creatures.
But mostly she notices the silence. There is the low thrum of flies, like cars on a distant motorway. The earth and rocks and wood tick as they draw heat into them. And there’s the dull thud of her boots as they hit the ground, felt more than heard. These sounds are almost mute in their soft constancy. And yet the bigger sounds, particularly the voices of other hikers, don’t carry far at all, not when she passes them going in the opposite direction or when those who walk more quickly come upon her from behind. These people seem to come out of nowhere, unannounced. She doesn’t recall that this happened last time, probably because they’d barely encountered anyone else on the trail. And the one person they knew was out there navigated the silence with intentional stealth.
Silence is uncommon at home. She lives with four men, all of them tumbleweeds of activity, so silence rarely has a chance to catch up with her there.
Lately though, she’s not the only female in the house. Her eldest son has a girlfriend and she stays over some nights.
A pair of shoes marked her arrival into their home. Black leather and gold-studded gladiator-styled footwear, giddily high, left at the front door. Samantha paused to study those carelessly toppled shoes that first morning. She tried to form a picture of their owner. Was she a reckless girl or a trusting one? Slutty or sexually confident? Was she stirring in her son’s bed with regret or contentment? Did her son pursue her or did she pursue him?
Oddly, the shoes had brought Lisa to mind – a brief flash to the past before this full-on return she’s brought them on. Lisa would’ve had the courage to kick her shoes off at the door of a boy she’d only just met too.
‘He could have told us,’ Samantha said to Harry. ‘It would’ve been embarrassing if one of us had walked in on him this morning.’
‘Maybe that’s why they’re there. To let us know we can’t do that anymore.’
‘Odd way of telling us.’
‘He’s just letting us know he’s a man now, Sam. Not a boy.’
‘Having sex doesn’t make you a man.’
Harry’s pride was palpable. He looked at Samantha with a smile fuller than any she’d seen for their son’s other achievements. ‘They could have been loafers,’ he said.
‘So that’s why you’re so pleased?’
‘I won’t deny it.’
Samantha’s first son was born with a concern for others that she thought normal until the other two came along. Then she realised this quality was unique to him. He never had an interest for the violent Xbox games that the other two liked to play. And while all three were talented schoolboy athletes, he never had the swagger of his brothers. Never had their coarse mouths or rough and tumble forthrightness. Never had their certainty.
Harry works in a man’s world. He works with men who sweat and swear and wolf whistle at women. He’s worked on sites where Fridays are celebrated with cases of beer and a stripper. He works with male pipes. He works with female pipes. They are a natural fit, one into the other.
‘At least I can stop worrying now.’
Samantha worries about one-punch drunks and brain tumours and car accidents. He worries about whom his child chooses to love?
She wanted to burst his self-satisfied bubble. Burst his stupid notion that a bad diagnosis had just been exchanged for a good one. Remind him that a pair of heels at the front door might only indicate a confused young man trying to conform.
‘Maybe he’s still trying to work it out,’ she said. ‘Maybe next time it will be loafers. What’ll you do then?’
Harry looked down at those black strappy heels for some time. They represented everything easy and known and ordered to him. They took away the need for him to reconfigure his thinking. They allowed him to be the same man he’s always been. Eventually he sighed long and deep, which made Samantha think she’d achieved that rupture.
‘What I’ve always done,’ he said. ‘Love him.’ He stepped over the girl’s shoes then and walked out the door.
He’s stepped over other shoes of hers since – different heels, ballet pumps, scuffed sneakers. Samantha knows their presence is like a shrine at their front door. They bring Harry peace. She still expects to see loafers.
Samantha looks ahead to Lisa. She’s far enough in front not to look like she’s holding herself back to wait for her, but close enough that she can still keep an eye on her progress. She probably thinks Samantha doesn’t notice what she’s doing. All those casual stops she makes to look off into the scrub as though she’s spotted something of interest.
But it’s not just the pauses. Samantha knows Lisa could walk much faster too if she wanted to. She was always a lean and sporty girl; ribs on show more often than not like corrugations on a road. From what Samantha can tell, not much has changed. And despite the passage of time and the lines that come with age, the loss of tone and shine to skin and hair, she thinks Lisa will take her good looks into middle age with ease.
Samantha’s often thought about the opportunities that being thin and pretty brings to a girl, especially as she becomes aware of her body, notices the way it’s read by others – by boys, men, other women. She recognised early on that thinness awarded girls a confidence that larger girls didn’t or couldn’t always possess; a way of being amongst others that the non-thin had little experience of or understanding for. Growing up, Lisa was pretty but unaware. Still is it seems. That she never attempted to exploit her good fortune is something Samantha always admired about her.
She remembers a time when the three of them were in Lisa’s bedroom getting ready for a school disco. They dressed under the poster gaze of Madonna, Cyndi Lauper and Annie Lennox, their faces carefully pulled from Smash Hits magazines and stuck to Lisa’s walls with Blu-Tack.
They were at Lisa’s because she had more make-up than Samantha and Nicole combined. And Lisa’s mother wouldn’t tell them to take off their too liberally applied blue eye shadow and candy pink blusher before they left the house as Samantha’s or Nicole’s mothers would. And regardless of what they wore, Lisa’s mother always told them they looked lovely.
Samantha’s mother was more honest. Mostly though, Samantha sensed her mother’s opinion of what she wore more than her actually expressing it. She had an arch eyebrow and stern look that conveyed a thousand words worth of criticism.
She had hauled Samantha off to a specialist lingerie store when she was eleven. There, a stranger scooped and cupped and levered her already wholesome breasts into a sturdy and supportive underwire bra. Samantha’s trim but buxom mother looked on, that eyebrow arched to indicate this was serious business. They’re a liability, not an asset, she told her until she finally believed it.
An
d Samantha learned just how much of a liability when the boys at school with their tit-sensing radars sneaked up behind her and ran a finger down her spine and over the bra’s fastener. Yep! They called to their mates.
Samantha always thought Lisa was better equipped to manage the liability of breasts like hers. She’d have kept all sides of her clear when she walked between classes. Left plenty of space to swing her fists.
Samantha put on her usual loose-fitting top to wear to the disco this day. The type her mother encouraged. It fell like a tent from her boobs. It was buttercup yellow. She thought it looked good with her long nutmeg-coloured hair. It was sequined round the neckline, which Samantha hoped would catch the disco lights. She wore it loose over black stirrup pants and sparkly court shoes.
Lisa wore an electric blue jumpsuit with shoulders big enough to be cast in Dynasty. She came up to Samantha once she was dressed and fiddled with the hem of her long, loose top. She gathered it together at one hip, held it there with one hand. She leaned back to appraise the effect.
‘What d’you think?’ she asked Nicole.
Nicole nodded. ‘Better.’
Lisa dropped the hem of Samantha’s top and went over to her dressing table. She rummaged through one of its drawers till she found what she was after. She came back with a round diamante-studded T-shirt clip in her hand. She held it between her lips as she made a tail of the hem of Samantha’s top again, then took the clip from her mouth and threaded the fabric through it so that it was nipped in across Samantha’s waist and hips.
‘Doesn’t it make them look bigger?’ The look went against her mother’s longstanding advice: Don’t draw attention to them. Don’t give people cause to stare. By people she came to expect her mother meant boys.
‘It makes you look in proportion,’ Nicole said. ‘Curvy.’ And she shimmied her own lithe body.
Nicole never looked out of proportion, not then in her short denim skirt and pedal pushers. Not in track pants or flannelette pyjamas or baggy jumpers. Samantha took comfort – confidence – from her friend’s appraisal. She made the simple tethering of her top sound scientific.