Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  It is that time in kindy when the birthday party has full currency. I am inviting you to my party. I am not inviting you to my party. Parties provide full access to games of chasies, to first dibs on the blocks in the classroom, to additional playlunch treats from other people’s lunch boxes. I hear of invites being slid across the room, passed to other people. Trudi Andrews gave one to Sally Waters. Jennie Gordon handed invitations to five girls, not one of them me.

  With my father smashing about the house and my mother sitting awake at the narrow melamine dining table weeping all night, there is no room in my house for parties or for lunchtime invitations. Instead, I huddle in the classroom at recess, poring over the coloured story cards and paper books, my mouth watering with the anticipation of all those words, the worlds to be unlocked.

  Outside of the kindy room, we line our bags up on a brown bench, the paint thick and glossy. At this bench the simple miracle of my first party invite occurs, and it is Rebecca Garden who gives it to me. Standing alongside me she whispers, ‘I am having a party.’ Just as simple as that. And then: ‘You are invited.’

  I say, ‘When is it?’

  ‘Today,’ she says. ‘This afternoon.’

  When the afternoon bell rings, I walk home with the bubble and hope of a party softening every step. My father is in the front yard, his white singlet streaked with brown from dirt and work. My sister holds my hand, and the whine of the lawnmower is everywhere, so we wait like that, holding hands. After a while the waiting isn’t working so my sister shouts and he can’t hear over the mower so then she stands right in front of him and she keeps shouting until he stops, and the front yard is so quiet it hurts my ears.

  ‘It’s a party,’ my sister says. ‘Down at the creek.’

  ‘One of the creek houses?’ Dad looks up fast, maybe thinking of Ted the Wrecker and why he would have a party for kids like me. But I am not going to Ted the Wrecker’s house although my dad does know him because my dad knows everyone because he is the boss of the police station and that means he’s the boss of Boolaroo.

  She says, ‘It’s at the Gardens’ house.’

  He gives a five-dollar note to my sister, and the bubble inside me floats up through my feet and up.

  We buy a family block of chocolate and a Little Golden Book, The Saggy Baggy Elephant, and my sister wraps them both in soft yellow tissue paper. It’s a hot day, the beginning of summer, and the creek is murky green down the back of Boolaroo. We pass Ted the Wrecker’s and we cross over the narrow bridge and then we are in the single street that makes up Cockle Creek and I hold my breath with the excitement of it, using ordinary words to keep myself on the ground. Bait, I think, spelling it out in my head. And: Prawn. Walking. Toast. Only when we are closer to the few houses that are in Cockle Creek, only then do I let myself have other words: Party. Pure. Golden.

  Cockle Creek is darker than Boolaroo. The houses in this small row are all made of wood or fibro, with wire fences. The house with the number that Rebecca Garden has given me has a couch on the front porch, its green upholstery torn and battered. A mystery, I think, to have an outside couch, and I linger over the word mystery. My sister takes a breath so deep I see her lungs expand. I feel her hand take mine, and we step through the gate. It’s clear there are no other children here yet, so my offering will be received in special glory.

  We knock, and Rebecca Garden’s mother comes to the door. Her bum is so wide that she has to stand sideways to get through the door onto the step. She looks down at me, with my yellow-wrapped present, and her face slides sideways to my sister, who, squeezing my hand, looks up at Rebecca Garden’s mother and says, ‘She’s here for the party.’

  ‘Party?’

  I whisper, ‘It’s a party. For Rebecca. It’s her birthday.’

  The wide-bummed woman looks right at me then. ‘Her birthday isn’t until August.’

  I think of some other words quick-smart. Lickety-split, I think. Tickety-boo.

  I say, ‘It’s today. Actually.’

  We wait while Rebecca Garden’s mother slams the screen door and lumbers back into the darkness of the house. When she comes back out, she has Rebecca Garden attached to her hip, clinging behind her, and she has a wooden spoon in her other hand. She says, ‘I will give her a thrashing, the little liar.’ Rebecca looks at her feet, in her little cross sandals, dirt blotting around them, and then she looks back up to me, her face a sharp pink. My stomach twists. It was so stupid of me. So horribly stupidly stupid to think there was a party, to have got it so stupidly wrong. And with my sister there, watching. Everything is shadowy now, dark. A cloud moves over Cockle Creek and Boolaroo and Rebecca Garden’s hair is mousy brown, not blonde. Her fat mother says, ‘She’ll be getting the wooden spoon, that’s for sure.’ I can’t say anything, not a word to Rebecca. When the door closes, I can hear her wailing.

  All the way home my sister and I are silent, walking along the dirt road to First Street. Our feet plap and slap on the road, my throat clogs with the red dirt from it, my face smudged with red so that you can’t tell where I am burning and where I am dust.

  My father is still mowing the lawn, his singlet speckled with the frightening bits of grass that fly up and sting. He doesn’t look up as we walk in the gate. My sister gives me the Little Golden Book and one row of the chocolate. The rest, she says, is for her to share with the other sisters. The chocolate has three different flavours in it: caramel, coconut ice, Turkish delight. The Turkish delight is disgusting, so I throw my half-sucked square of that in the bin. The others I eat before dinner, while I crouch over the story of the Saggy Baggy Elephant, who never feels properly dressed, who never feels let in.

  Rebecca Garden is not at school the next day, or the day after that, and then it is the weekend, when I sit outside and watch my father circling the horses in the paddock. When she comes back to school her hair is not in ringlets, it is tied back into plain pigtails. We don’t look at each other, we don’t share, we don’t speak. I only see the circle of bruising on her arm when Miss Noble makes her draw a letter R for Rebecca on the blackboard. The chalk makes a rattle on the board and I think: R is for rescue and rotund and rabbit and rather. My mouth waters at the thought of the word rotund and I say it to myself all morning. Rotund. Rotund. Rotund.

  But the thrill of the lie, the glory of it: this I hold to myself, nursing it like a water bottle, warm against my belly. Audacity is a word I learn later, the next year, when my sister is caught out with a boy. The audacity of Rebecca Garden’s lie pleases me. The courage of it. It’s a lie that says: I will not be the poor girl at the creek with no party and no money and no friends. I will be someone else.

  It’s a lie that says: Fuck you. This is not straw. It is gold.

  Although I do not learn that word until I am seven, when the older boy next door invites me over and asks politely if I would like to fuck.

  Winter arrived in Sydney after the trial, as though signifying the end of something greater than a single season. The trial, the turns within it, marked the end of me. Or at least, the end of this version of myself. It was as though I’d burned, or drowned, the girl who kicked her heels hopefully at that party. After, I was wet with the sopping sense of shame it left in its wake, and sore with the sealing up of my words. I would not speak of this, I swore, not again, not after all those words battering me in that dusty courtroom.

  Rain sheeted down on the last day, sudden and brutal the way Sydney rains are, leaving oil-slicked puddles across the roads and footpaths. Water dripped from shoes, hair, coats. Darkness dropped down early, an abrupt, dusk-free curtain tightly drawn, denoting the last stage of autumn. When I left the courthouse, I untied my hair from the tight bun I’d scraped it into and walked through the rain until my clothes clung to me like plastic wrap to a sausage. I felt as though I’d been compressed and minced, pulped in a machine. Churned through. I had no hat, no raincoat, no umbrella, and I let the water pound on my head, dripping down my back. If it hailed, I didn’t feel it. I co
uldn’t tell if it was warm or cold, could barely hear the traffic I stepped dully into, hardly blinked at the driver who tooted his horn at me, shouting that I’d get myself killed. Water seeped into my shoes and I nodded, held my hand up in a salute and kept walking. Droplets spattered with each step until my shoes were sodden, leaving black stripes across my feet when I peeled my tights off that night, shivering with a chill so deep I was sure that my bones were frozen.

  In the weeks after that the cold of winter set in properly, and I met it with the warmth of vodka and strangers, lots of strangers. Friends of friends of friends, or men I met in loud nightclubs, shouting over Cyndi Lauper. Anyone who could keep the babble out of my head.

  I had no feelings about the man whose sperm made the beginnings of the baby. Shooting Soldiers: that was the name of his band. I kid you not. Naturally, he played bass. Paper blinds crinkled against the window of my share-house bedroom, the tears patched with coloured tape. The bass player paused at the door of the room, staring in astonishment at the lack of floor space. Every surface was covered with crumpled clothes, CDs, batches of papers and books. On the floor, my mattress—I couldn’t afford a bed base—swam beneath this surface of chaos, and to get into bed at night I kicked the pile aside, huddling deep down into the covers and pretending not to notice the encroaching pile surrounding me.

  The bass player suggested we turn the light out so that he didn’t have to look at the mess. I’d spent my life working on that principle, so it seemed perfectly acceptable to me. He didn’t use a condom. I didn’t ask him to.

  Somewhere underneath the Vesuvius of clothing and books and assorted detritus, somewhere in there a pill packet floated. Sometimes I remembered to dig it out. Sometimes I did not.

  When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. But he’d left me a little gift.

  The clinic sat at the intersection of two busy roads. Friendly white doors, with the word Preterm written in a cheerful orange arc. When the door opened the word broke in two: Pre. Term. Sylvie came with me, the same way I’d gone with her three years earlier, when David Fox failed to put on the condom he’d promised to use. It was, he explained, different for a man. He was twenty-three, a man to Sylvie’s seventeen-year-old girl. We took the day off school and caught the 5 a.m. train into Sydney, staring out the window at the sun burning over the sandstone of the Hawkesbury River. Every so often we burst out, It’s different for a man, and folded over in desperate, sad laughter. By the time we got to Sydney, we’d worn the catchphrase thin and our laughter sounded only sad.

  Sylvie, like Lisa O’Daniel, was one of the pretty girls. In high school, she sat on the beach nursing Chiko rolls for surfing boyfriends, her thin brown legs stretched out before her. At fifteen, we planned to run away together to Byron Bay, until her mother offered to buy her a new surfboard if she stayed. At school, we competed for first place, checking our grades against each other’s. When Mr King took me aside after our yearly exams and said, ‘You are the smartest girl in the school, full stop. Now stop wasting your talents, Kacey,’ I asked, ‘Smarter than Sylvie?’

  Mr King touched my ponytail—I’d wound curling ribbon in it, so that I looked like a Christmas gift—and said again, ‘Stop wasting your talents.’ He rested his hand on my shoulder, pressing it so that his fingers pointed down, just touching the trim of my bra. Through the thin cotton of my school blouse, he lifted the bra strap lightly, absent-mindedly. I heard, many years later, that he’d married an ex-student. Strange, the way things work out.

  Sylvie fell in love with David Fox. Or, she thought she might be in love with him. Could try to be. Until he lied about the condom and we made our pre-dawn trip to Sydney, to the Preterm Clinic.

  And then, three years later, it was my turn. It was louder than I’d expected, the machine gagging, a chugging engine roar as though a tractor drove through my gut, razing everything, me included. Afterwards, I sat in the waiting room reading the pamphlets and eating soft sliced cheese on Sao crackers. My hand kept going to the crackers, my mouth kept opening, I kept eating until the red plastic plate was empty of everything but crumbs.

  I always thought it was a girl.

  If I’d kept her, I would have named her Tabitha.

  It was Sylvie’s idea to leave. She was always courageous. In our last year of school, not long after David Fox’s little sperm wriggled its way to Sylvie’s egg, she caught the train home from the city one night and walked home along the wooded cycle path. Halfway there, she heard footsteps coming closer behind her, crunching on the dirt. She started to walk faster—not to make a big deal of it, if there was a stranger minding his own business, just escalating her pace a little. The pace of the footsteps following escalated too. She tried to say this to herself: It’s okay. I’m overreacting. It’s someone having a joke. Because this is what you learn to do, when you are a girl walking alone. Try to stay calm but be ready to run. Like walking past wild animals, we train ourselves: Stay calm, keep your distance, don’t make him mad.

  She only started sprinting, her heart burning, when she could hear the running behind her.

  The stranger behind Sylvie wrapped his arm across her chest, just below her throat. With her back pressed against him, she could feel how tall he was. His hand rested at the nape of her neck which, he promised, he would break if she struggled. She did not struggle. Afterwards, she walked home, crying, and told no one what had happened. For months after, she didn’t answer the phone. On weekends, she said she was busy, didn’t want to go out, wanted to be left alone. After the trial of the taxi driver, the trial where I was not, allegedly, on trial, I stopped answering my own phone. That was when Sylvie told me what had happened to her.

  I sat beside her on a bench outside the Hopetoun Hotel, a bottle of cider in my hand. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you talk about it?’

  She snorted, lifting her head slightly. ‘Right. Like talking about it worked out so well for you.’

  I opened my mouth, then shut it again.

  She took a swig of her cider, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. ‘Anyway, it happens to girls all the time. If we talked about it every time some dick moved on us, we’d never shut up. There’d be no space for anything else.’

  Peeling green paint covered the metal bench. Some of the paint flecks stuck to my bare legs. Sylvie stared out at the sweeping traffic and she said, ‘You should just go. Go as far away as you can.’ Her hand slipped into mine. We had that sort of friendship: hand-holding, heads leaning close, whispering. ‘Everything,’ she said, ‘has turned to shit.’

  I shook my head and said, ‘I’ve got nowhere to go.’ I had no means, no plan, no way.

  She said, ‘Get off this bloody land. Go somewhere.’ She peered at me. ‘Look at you. You’re a mess.’

  I patted at my hair, tried to wipe the smears from under my eyes.

  ‘No. God, not your make-up. You’re a mess emotionally. You need to get out of this hole.’

  I grinned, then, opening my arms wide to the Surry Hills traffic, sang the refrain from ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’.

  She was still staring into the traffic. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We do.’ Then: ‘Come to India with me. Let’s go to India.’

  I said, ‘How? I’ve got no money. Neither have you. How would we get to India?’

  She said, ‘My mother will help. Maybe—’ her voice less sure here ‘—maybe she’ll help you too.’

  Although I said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous, why would she help me?’ I had a tiny flame of hope. Maybe I could escape, make some cash somehow, get on a plane and get off this giant island. Be somewhere else, be someone else. Don Quixote, tripping through the world, questing, adventuring, making himself the knight of knights.

  But Sylvie’s mother could not help me. So only one of us went to India.

  I caught the bus to the airport to see her off. She cashed in the first of her traveller’s cheques and we drank Bloody Marys in the airport bar, ticking off memories until her final boarding call. We clung to
each other like lovers, crying until we hiccupped, and the airline assistant said it was time to go and we swore undying love to each other as though we were in a movie.

  After Sylvie left for India, for a new exotic life, I stared at maps of the world and got fired from one waitressing job after another until my flatmates left me a note letting me know they’d had a vote and it was time for me to leave. I looked at the map pinned to the living room wall—a 1940s etching of Australia, fringed by the islands of the Pacific—and I traced my finger along the threshold of the land. How far would be far enough? How far, I wondered, would I have to travel to get away from myself and the stench of my own failures? I flattened my hand against the pale blue surrounding the continent, wishing myself into the depth of it, and wondered what it would take to burn everything behind me.

  I bought the backpack from an English girl, a friend of a friend. ‘Broome,’ she said. ‘That’s where you need to go. That will heal you, darlin’.’ The dropped ‘g’ on darling was an affectation, I thought, as though she’d heard the phrase spoken in an old American film—probably by Elizabeth Taylor playing Southern—and used it whenever the opportunity came up. She hugged me after that, held me so close that my nose bent sideways against her cheek; I could see a glob of golden wax, curled like a foetus inside her ear. She said, ‘You poor thing.’ The friend who’d introduced us, a girl from drama school, looked at her feet, clasping her hands at her crotch, an external chastity belt. I’m sure she didn’t realise the implication. I’m sure she didn’t realise, either, that my troubles were private, mine to tell.

  Although when you’ve stood in a courtroom talking about your knickers and your sexual habits, your sense of privacy does get a little distorted.