by Jessie Cole
I didn’t know how to explain it. All those things I’d seen from the outside for so long but never been within. The slide of a finger against my skin, a breath at my neck. I was perfectly capable of putting two and two together, but lost as to how to actually begin, even there under the cover of night. I willed him in my silence to step towards me, but he didn’t. I wondered if it would always be this way. If I would always be filled with longing and never assuaged. I wondered if all women were like this. Filled to brimming with need, but always left wanting.
‘It’s not that big a thing, Mema,’ Billy said, kicking at the dirt. ‘No big deal.’
I didn’t know what he meant. I could feel my breath inside my chest expanding as though I was only breathing in.
‘It’s not?’ I choked out.
‘Just a bit of fun, you know?’
Even though he kept his face down, I could see in the moonlight he was glancing up at me. Eyes hidden but watchful.
I didn’t know. I knew nothing. ‘Maybe for you.’
‘Who you saving yourself for?’
Hamish came into my mind, unbidden. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out his form.
‘It’s him, isn’t it? The stranger.’
It was as though he could smell my need upon me. I shook my head. It was a private thing. The insides of my mind my own.
‘He’s not right for you, Mema,’ Billy said. ‘It’s all wrong.’
I knew that but it didn’t help.
‘He’s so slick. You know how many girls he’d have up his sleeve?’
I nodded there in the dark. I knew that too.
‘Does he even want you?’
He stepped towards me and I faltered then, needing something to lean on. I moved backwards until the rough wall of the shack was behind me. He stopped a second, watching me, and then he stepped up closer, breaching the gap.
‘I want you.’ He said it real quiet, quiet but sure. ‘And I don’t care about any of the stuff he would.’
I didn’t understand what he was getting at.
‘I don’t care about your mum, all that shit she does.’ I felt myself stiffen but he kept on whispering. ‘I don’t care about Sophie and whatever crap about me she whispers in your ear.’ He was suddenly very near. ‘I don’t even care about your fucking dodgy foot. I like it.’
His words were rough and they rubbed against my heart like sandpaper, but in that moment it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted something and I wanted it bad.
‘Billy,’ it was hard to get the words out, ‘I don’t know what to do.’
I could hear his breath in the quiet moonlight. He was right in front of me, holding out his hands and grasping onto mine. His fingers were dry, and I couldn’t help but imagine them as I had before, touching me like I was clay. Even though it was dark, in my mind I could see every black hair on his knuckles, every furrowed line that crisscrossed his brown fingers. It struck me that maybe I’d never really looked at his hands. Maybe all the images I held in my mind had come from some other place. Maybe nothing inside my head was real at all.
Slowly, I pulled my hands from his and looped my fingers around his wrists. The skin on the top of his hands was rough beneath my thumbs but the underside was soft. In my mind I could see his blue veins pressing against his skin. I slid the pads of my fingers along his wrists, trying to learn him with my touch. His face was still in shadow, but I could feel something within him shift. He seemed suddenly kinder. I ran my fingers down the undersides of his forearm, imagining his strength. He juddered a little, but he didn’t pull away.
‘Ticklish,’ was all he said, and I wondered if he was impatient. I wondered if he’d done this all a million times before.
‘I’ve never done it when I’m not drunk.’
I knew I didn’t need to say that I’d never done it at all.
It was irksome, that pause before action, that endless, stilted moment of waiting. I wanted to help him but I didn’t know how. Almost millimetre by millimetre he bent his head towards me. The scrape of his beard against my skin was soundless, but it felt loud in my head. I wished I could see him, then maybe I wouldn’t be so scared. He moved his cheek against mine, tenderer than I’d expected, and then inched his mouth closer until his lips brushed the tips of mine. He breathed my name, a whisper, but the humming in my mind seemed to swallow the sound. I’d lost my moorings and I felt myself gripping his arms.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t hurt ya.’
There was no reason to believe him, but there I was doing just that. He twisted one of his arms free of my grip, slowly, so I wouldn’t get a start, and then he moved his hand across me, in a lingering sort of way, touching me in places I’d never been touched. I was holding my breath, still stuck in some kind of waiting. Hoping against hope that it was worth waiting for. He slid my skirt up, and I stood there still clinging to that one arm. He groaned then and pressed himself against me, and I could feel all his hardness at once.
‘It’s different when you’re not pissed,’ he whispered against my ear. ‘You can feel it more.’
I was glad for him, but I didn’t know if it was true for me, having nothing to compare. I could sense his pleasure, as though through glass, but I couldn’t feel it myself. He tugged his arm free of my grasp and lifted my skirt there in the darkness, pushing my underpants down. I didn’t do a thing to hinder him. He pushed himself against the bareness of me and then he pulled back a little and unzipped his pants. Tussling around, he struggled to get himself free. I tried again to imagine I was the clay and his hands were shaping me, but now he’d gotten this far, he’d stopped touching me, there was only the press of his hardness against me and the rough wall at my back. I let go of something in my mind, something I was holding, and I let his body do its thing. All the tugging and pressing seemed outside me, I floated somewhere above. There was a tearing kind of pain, but I don’t think I made a sound. He’d lost me along the way to the starry night sky. I don’t know how long it took, maybe a few minutes, maybe more. But I knew when he shuddered against me that he was done.
‘Sorry, Mema,’ he whispered, voice all raspy. ‘I didn’t mean to … come inside you. It just … happened.’
What could I say? I’d been around sex long enough to know far better. It wasn’t entirely his fault. He stayed pressed up against me and I could feel his bristly cheek brushing my neck. It was suffocating, that feeling, and I fought the strongest urge to push him away. Finally he stood up straighter and adjusted himself in the dark. Whatever had been between us moments before was gone. My skirt collapsed back down around my legs and I could feel the wet stickiness of what he’d left dribbling down my thigh. I didn’t know where my underpants were and I couldn’t see anything much in the dark. I had a vision of them, abandoned outside the shack, strewn amongst all the forsaken things, and I couldn’t help feeling that if anybody saw them they’d know in an instant they were mine.
‘Maybe we should go to the chemist. Get that morning-after pill?’ Billy said. ‘I could take you in tomorrow, before work, soon as it opens.’
I imagined walking into the pharmacy to ask for such a thing, all those eyes upon me. The knowns and unknowns colliding there in that small-town store. Every face familiar and all of them reflecting back at me who they thought I was. The lame girl needs the morning-after pill. You know, the one with the potter mother? I couldn’t see Billy’s face in the dark, but I could picture it. He was holding firm. I knew it was a brave thing to offer. To take me to the chemist. It made me see he was a certain sort of man. I leaned forward and hugged him then, just gave him a big squeeze.
‘It’ll be okay,’ I said. ‘It’s not the right time.’
I thought of my cycle, when I would bleed, and I hoped I was right.
He stood there holding me, gingerly. ‘You sure?’ he said, but I could sense his relief.
There was no way I was hobbling into that pharmacy, even with Billy at my back. I nodded against his chest. It was comforting,
the size of him. His heart beat beneath my ear. After a bit he pulled himself free and I wished again that I could see his face.
‘We better go.’
I shrugged, ’cause in that moment everything seemed fleeting.
‘I’ll walk you home.’
I shook my head, I didn’t need that. ‘I’ll be okay.’
He peered at me in the dark. ‘Alright, but you take the torch,’ he slipped it into my hand.
I nodded. Now he’d moved away from me, I wanted him gone.
‘Well, see ya then, Mema,’ he said, leaning down to kiss my head.
Standing there, I felt like a child. Baby-girl again. And in a minute he disappeared, lost in the darkness of those paddocks, a shifting shape against the night.
I walked for a bit, away from the shack, disorientated and shivery. It was hard to comprehend that all the feeling I’d stored within—the heat, the longing—could lead to those few minutes with Billy. It seemed a violation somehow, though I’d brought it on myself. I wandered in the dark, empty and aimless, my belly churning and raw. Inside, I was all commotion, but on the outside I felt numb. Stopping a second, I touched my fingers to my face, tracing its familiar contours, pinching the skin on my cheeks until the numbness receded. Then I lay down on the ground. The grass was prickly beneath my back, stars bright, sky black and vast. The smell of earth and growth and darkness was all around me. And despite what I’d done with Billy, I closed my eyes and thought of the stranger.
In that place behind my eyes all sorts of things were possible. Images could rise and fall, spaces could fill and empty. Words could trail across the sky. I could call him to me and he would come. I could bid him to stand naked and he would heed me. I could press my tongue to the hollow of his throat and feel the shudder of his body against mine. Behind my eyes he was not retreating. He was upright and fearless, and he didn’t look away. I imagined him holding up his hands in surrender, his pale body gleaming in the night. And in that secret place, I wasn’t stymied by my lacks. I could reach out for him and my hand would find his touch. He would speak words to me, soft and low, and I would laugh in the face of time and all those who had gone before and failed.
When my eyes opened, my body was alive. The ants had found me even in the dark. I could feel their light tread upon my skin, see the flicker of their movement. I thought of Anja and the kiss. It played on me uneasily, an anomaly, tricky to define. In another time and space I might have reached down and brushed the ants away, but on that night I welcomed them, blending into the dark. Spreading my arms wide, I surrendered to the ground beneath me, to its accommodating touch. And suddenly I wished I was naked, that I could feel each blade of grass—that the bristly edges of things would relieve my need.
Quickly, I pulled my singlet free, slipped my skirt off. Turning over I felt the roughness of the paddock on my breast, against my pelvis, my belly, my knees. I pushed down against it, willing the earth to conform to the curves of my body. Stretching myself out to feel every undulation. My hands slid out into the grass, feeling the strands between my fingers. My nakedness pressed into that midnight paddock. I lay face down, breathing against the earth, and I conjured him again behind my eyes.
He was beneath me and I could surge hard against his form. It didn’t matter the force with which I pressed, or the weight of me, he took it all and then some. And when I opened my eyes, his were right there in front of me, blue and bright and clean as the day we met. I had never been absorbed by his mouth, it wasn’t lush and soft like mine, but behind my eyes I was drawn to it, and slid my cheek against his lips.
Scraping there against the grass, I felt the tide of my body swell. Pulling to some external point, humming with need. My nipples grew hard against the blades, and I raised myself so I could move my breasts against the green tips. Swaying there a while, I savoured the touch.
I turned over, naked and open, and sat up a little to look down on my form. In the dim moonlight I was lovely, no stains or marks or defects, though the imprint of the grass pressed against my knees. I gently rubbed them. And then, without another thought, I finally touched myself, wet and mysterious in the dark. It was sore down there, tender, and I steered clear of where he’d been inside me. I thought of the water hole, and all the pockets and crevices of the creek bank. I imagined the swell of the flooding creeks, the way the water rose to fill spaces that were invisible before the rain. All those secret hollows. I touched myself and in my mind the velvet of the water ran all around me.
In an instant the darkness of the sky was illuminated by a lone strike, and I knew with certainty that it would storm. The clouds would roll in and the clear, starry night would turn wild. I waited a few moments, my fingers stilled, and then it came. A strike of lightning and the rumbling echo of thunder. My fingers sought that wet place. I watched the sky and the lingering image of him dispersed into the air, though my body sat hungry and heavy with pleasure, my breathing short and light. I had found my rhythm. A drop landed on my cheek, then my belly, and I smelled that deep lushness that comes just before the rain.
My body quivered with readiness, my breathing harsh. All at once the rain crashed around me, an avalanche of sound. I opened my mouth to receive the drops, the water rushing across my face in lines. I felt it slide against my body, smooth and slippery, and then it was upon me—the shuddering spasm of ending. I heard myself moan. Sitting in the rain, quenched and dripping, I threw back my head and laughed.
22.
That night I slept like I hadn’t in years. Tucked up and naked under my doona, my pile of wet clothes hidden in the corner, I didn’t even think about my lost undies, not once. But when I woke up it was the first thing that popped into my mind, and I hoped they weren’t in some obvious place turning starchy in the sunshine. Though on reflection, the shack was a lost kind of place, and I couldn’t imagine who might pass by it to see.
The storm was over, come and gone fast in the night, and I lay there for a few minutes, just enjoying the feel of my skin on the sheets. Lifting the doona, I peered at myself, and in the cool morning light I seemed unchanged from yesterday, but I knew I wasn’t. My body, so familiar, had become new. I sniffed at my arm and it smelled like the rain, clean but with a touch of the earth. I rubbed the back of my hand across my face, and I don’t know why but I touched it with my tongue. It didn’t taste like anything much and, truth be told, I was a little disappointed.
Even though it was Billy who’d had me at the shack, I didn’t think about him. I didn’t even think of the stranger. I just lay under those covers and thought about me, and all the ways I could have my own pleasure. I thought of the coolness of the creek water on my skin, how when I plunged down fast and burst back out, my whole body tingled, and if I sat in the sunshine afterwards the goosebumps on my arms and legs would spread out, hairs standing on end. Those dots would sweep from my extremities in towards my core, and I could watch them stretch up my thighs in a wave until the gentle kiss of the sun would smooth them all away.
I thought about the places in the creek where the ochre rocks had been ground down to pebbles, where it was soft and pliant under my feet, and how, if I sat in the shallows, the pebbly soil would shape itself to my form, accommodating me like the palm of a giant hand.
And I was held.
I thought about Anja’s trees, how they seemed to reach out their branches to her, and when I was with her, to me too. How if we stretched our arms out and touched them, then maybe as the branches overlapped in the canopy, we’d be touching them all. I wondered if Anja would come back inside. If she would ever slip into my bed in the night like she had in the past, but most of all, I wondered whether, if she did, I would tell her these things about my body in those secret waking moments. I’d thought we’d shared everything, but now I knew we’d only shared what it was we’d known about ourselves, and all those deep-down unknown things—just as startling, just as true—we’d shielded each other from, as we’d shielded ourselves.
The day went by in a haze
, and if Mum noticed anything she wasn’t saying. It started off sunny, but by the afternoon the sky looked grey. Yet the rain had changed its meaning for me and I was looking out for those first fat drops, filled to the brim with longing. Images of Hamish still flashed inside my mind, but I pushed them away. I concentrated on what I’d learned of Billy—the soft undersides of his wrists, the scrape of his beard against my cheek. I was waiting for the night ’cause I knew he’d come again. I knew how we’d done it wasn’t good, the muffled fumbling, his breath against my neck, but I was hopeful. When I pictured the shack, stowed full of my desires, it was in a rainstorm, the pounding rhythm of the rain hard against the busted-up tin roof, and my secrets washing away, washing down the hillsides in rivulets. I wondered where we would go, Billy and I, and I wondered whether his hands could become like the water in the creek, finding my invisible places.
By lunch time my body was humming, but I was feeling anxious too. Anxious about Anja and how she was holding up. I hadn’t seen her since Old Dog died. Seven days at least. A week was the longest we’d ever been apart. Even when she went to school, we’d always seen each other in the afternoons.
I took a walk up to the door house, careful to keep out of sight. I’d tied up the pup beforehand, not wanting her to give me away. I was worried about Anja’s dad, worried about what had gone down. The closer I got, the more uneasy I became. Jumping at shadows and the rustling of leaves. When I saw the house I stayed in the cover of the trees for a minute, listening, but I couldn’t hear a thing. There was no sign of life at all. Hesitantly, I made the bird sound, our secret call, and I half expected to see Anja’s form shuffle out from somewhere and come towards me but there was nothing. Not the slightest movement from within.
After a while I crept closer, poised for flight if Anja’s dad should rear up out of nowhere, but he didn’t. In the end I inched forward and peered in one of the windows. Inside, the house was in disarray, broken plates, bits of food, clothes everywhere. No sign of Jim. I figured he must have taken off to get supplies. There was only so long he could go without a drink.