Fury

by Kathryn Heyman

  Sue waved her hand a little more. She wore no jewellery but somehow gave the impression that she did. Her colours matched: an aqua trim in her shorts was, as they say, ‘picked up’ by a short scarf knotted about her throat. The stripe in her white polo shirt was echoed by her striped belt. Her tanned face was lined around the eyes and the mouth. When she spoke, the crease between her mouth and nose deepened and danced. I couldn’t stop watching it, waiting for the next movement.

  I said, ‘The boat is amazing. It’s like being inside a house.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is. We live half of the time on the boat, because we are in the fortunate position to be able to do so.’

  She gave no indication of what enabled them to be in this fortunate position.

  I smiled again. She said, ‘So,’ again, and then we sat in the sort of silence that crackles. I told her I’d sailed as a kid, weekends at the local sailing club, and she raised her eyebrows a little.

  She took a pen out of the pocket of her polo shirt and reached behind her to the galley counter (it looked like marble, but surely it wasn’t?) to retrieve a small spiral notepad. ‘So, Kassie, is it?’

  ‘Kacey. Like the Sunshine Band.’ For some reason, I added, ‘I like to sing,’ as though my ability to spout disco tunes would keep her and her family entertained on the sea. I wanted to be on this boat, though. I wanted to dive from it, to disappear on it.

  She smiled, teeth showing. Said, ‘Have you brought a résumé with you?’

  It had not occurred to me that I would need a résumé. I shook my head and spoke hurriedly. ‘I cooked a lot for my family growing up.’

  She tapped the pen against the table. Short nails, unpainted. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why did you cook growing up?’

  Why would you not? Instead I kept babbling. ‘I worked in an ice-cream shop and then lots of cafes, cooking and waitressing.’

  I’d never cooked anything in any cafe, ever, and when I made cappuccinos they were usually served with inadequate froth and half of the coffee slopped over the side.

  ‘What sorts of things would you propose cooking for us?’

  It may seem astonishing that I had not prepared anything, that I had put no thought into how I was to get this job which would finally, unalterably, change my life. But this was how I lived; it was how I got through school, how I failed to get through university, how I swam from job to job. No one had ever told me: prepare. Put the work in. I was falling through life, a dandelion spore drifting and landing wherever, whenever.

  What would I cook? What did people cook? What did they eat? What did proper adult humans, people who took care of themselves and others, people who did not huddle under their bedclothes weeping with shame—what did those people eat?

  ‘Casserole.’

  Sue glanced around as though someone were about to burst in, tell her what a joke this was, how funny it was. She said, ‘We have no budgetary restrictions.’ Her mouth made a little twist, as though she were holding in an unexpected surge of vomit.

  And again, I could not comprehend how such a thing could be possible. What did that even mean, no budgetary restrictions? Who had unlimited money? And what would they eat?

  When I was fifteen, I met Daniel. He was thin, with eyes sunk deep in his face. If I half-closed my eyes and looked at him through a certain kind of mental filter, he looked soulful, like an English pop star. He looked, through that blurred filter, like the sort of boyfriend a proper girl would have. He was perhaps nineteen, maybe twenty. I met him at a pub; he bought me a port and Coke and asked if he could take me to dinner the following weekend. Daniel was, in every respect, a proper gentleman.

  The following weekend, he collected me in his car. It had electric windows and I gleefully pressed the buttons to make them go up and down until we arrived at the restaurant, Dino’s. He’d dressed up: a tie, a suit. Cufflinks. He was the most dressed-up person in the room. It was one of those restaurants with a mezzanine: a semicircle of tables raised slightly above a lower floor. Like, perhaps, a ship’s dining room. It reminded me, anyway, of The Poseidon Adventure. We were led, by a waiter wearing a black bow tie, to a table looking down over the city. White tablecloths, made of real cloth. I said, ‘This is lovely.’

  Daniel raised his hand to the waiter—it was clear to me that he’d practised doing this, alone in his room—and he said, ‘It’s just a little place I like to come to sometimes.’ But when I asked him where the bathrooms were, he didn’t know. Later, after I’d had a Benedictine and Coke and half a glass of Blue Nun, a woman with dark curly hair piled on top of her head like Carmen Miranda came in with a basket of roses over her arm. Daniel wanted this to be the most romantic night ever. He’d practised. He’d tried so hard. When he asked me if I wanted a rose, I shook my head just a little, and when he asked again, adding, ‘Yes, you do,’ I nodded, because it seemed clear that this was what was supposed to happen. He was supposed to want to buy me a rose in a little plastic sheath, and I was supposed to want it. All of it—Dino’s, the tablecloths, the car, the rose—this was what girls wanted, what all the girls I knew wanted.

  Later, when my mother asked me breathlessly about the date, I said, ‘We had a fight,’ because that was easier than trying to explain. There was nothing wrong with Daniel. There was something wrong with me.

  But that restaurant was the most sophisticated place I had been. And in that moment, I remembered what was on the menu.

  ‘Beef Wellington.’

  Sue twisted her mouth again, looked down at her notepad, and then back at me. ‘And how would you make it?’

  ‘Just, um, the usual way.’

  ‘Well, I don’t cook, so what would your usual way be?’

  Outside, the melodic rattle of stays and anchor chains beat time to the wind. I sat back on the leather sofa, making it fart again. Sue raised her eyebrows. ‘Kassie? How would you make the beef Wellington?’

  I gave the cabin a final, adoring gaze. ‘With beef.’

  Outside, on the pier, the sun kept burning, and I felt nauseous at what I’d lost. A blister was forming on top of my toe. I bent over to stab at it, to see if I could find some satisfaction in popping it, in watching the warm liquid seep out, leaving only the flap of skin. But it would not be popped; it remained glassy and valiant, keeping its scar completely contained.

  Out on the road, I struggled to figure out which way to go, how to find my way back to the lodge. Away from the marina, Darwin was a series of squat buildings. North or south, left or right; I had no idea where the lodge was. Across the road, a few cars pootled past; a fat, bearded man called out the window of one of them, ‘Wanna fuck?’ I shook my head, and he stuck his finger up, adding, ‘Fuck off, you fat slag.’

  At least on that side of the road someone might stop, offer me a ride—hopefully without the invitation to fuck or the additional commentary on the size of my arse.

  In my second year of high school, I had returned after the summer break with a spectacular new pair of breasts. Presumably they’d been quietly growing all through the previous year, but I’d been oblivious to it. Summer arrived and, like well-watered flowers, they bloomed. Boys at school who had previously been my friends trailed behind me every day singing, ‘Am I Ever Gonna See My Feet Again?’ They thought it was hilarious. I walked with my head down. They were my friends. They wanted to make each other laugh, that was all. But each day my face grew hotter and my anger grew deeper until, midway through the term, I stopped, turned and shrieked, ‘FUCK OFF!’ I’d never said those words out loud. I’d never shouted at these boys, or at any boys. The three of them—I can see their faces and bodies but strain to remember their names. One was tall and gangly, his legs permanently bent, like a spider’s legs, his arms in constant motion, his red hair a tangle of enthusiastic curls. In first year, he broke the state record for the eight-hundred-metre sprint. Peter something. And another one, older than he should have been, already with the thin trace of a moustache
and jokes borrowed from his father. He had an old man’s name, too, something like Fred, or Frank. He had broken no records, but the year before he had made me laugh every day while we ate lunch together. And a short, skinny boy with a semi-permanent grin on his face, who wore a singlet under his school shirt; trying always to please the other boys, the teachers, the girls, anyone. Each of them stopped and drew back as though I’d thrown water on them.

  And then they stopped. They stopped singing. They stopped following me. They stopped talking to me. I returned to the state of invisibility from which my breasts had briefly called me. And I was lonely.

  After the car drove past on that Darwin road, the silence felt the same as it had back in high school. A limp echo of something that wasn’t desire, wasn’t hatred, but had something of both in it.

  Growing up as a girl, there were countless cars, countless boys and men, shouting their approval or disdain, commenting one way or another. Sometimes from cars, sometimes from footpaths. At thirteen, or maybe fourteen, Lisa O’Daniel and I walked the length of the main road in our town counting the times men told us they liked our tits, or walk, or hair or smile. We got two points for that. If a man asked us to smile or said, Hello, sweetheart/gorgeous/baby, that was one point. A plain hello only got half a point. We got to twenty points by the time we arrived at the main shops, and then Lisa suggested we split up. She’d walk on one side of the road, me on the other, and we’d count our own points and see who won. But I was bored with the game by then and, anyway, the handsome pony-tailed man who’d kept his eyes on my bra-less top while I walked had somehow unsettled me and I wanted to go home. The bus trip was long and lonely, though, and all the way back I stared out the window, hoping that one of the men on the bus would say something about how pretty I was. Just to each other, perhaps, but loud enough for me to hear.

  There were other men in cars, many, always. The men who drove down the streets, leaning out of the window, calling, ‘Show us your tits!’ A compliment? An invitation? A request?

  In another city, a car crawled along beside me quietly while I limped on a sprained ankle, keeping my eyes on the ground, trying not to antagonise.

  Once, after the trial, I’d borrowed Sylvie’s bicycle. I thought it might return me to myself, to cycle somewhere, to feel strong, to be mobile. I wore a fitted dress, black tights. At a set of traffic lights, I waited, feeling briefly happy, feeling that things might after all be possible. Straddling the bike, my skirt riding up a little, feet ready to hop back onto the pedals. A man walked in front of me, glanced down and said, ‘Nice cunt. I’d ride that.’ I stood, winded. The man strolled away, indifferent. And then I started to ride after him, calling for him to wait, to answer a couple of questions. The man ran. He ran down a lane and, when I followed him, he scrambled over a fence. And all I wanted was to ask this: What do you want to happen? What response do you want from me, from the other girls, when you shout your little cock-calls? But he could not, would not, answer me; he ran as though I brandished a knife.

  Now, there was just silence, and the occasional car blasting past, a shred of music floating behind it, a surge of dust pluming and settling. I stood on the verge, finger out, hopeful, trying to make my arse look smaller by leaning slightly forwards and standing half on tiptoes. It’s a trick I learned from Dolly magazine. Hurts your back but it’s worth it. Ants crawled across my feet and then my ankles, taking little bites out of my flesh, while I stood mesmerised, just watching. Even when tiny specks of blood appeared, I stood staring down at them swarming, unable to stamp my feet or raise my hand, just watching till the blood came.

  After a while I started walking in the direction that most of the cars were going in, turning around when I heard a car coming near so that they wouldn’t see my fat arse before my face. I remembered a girl telling me—she thought it was hilarious—about her boyfriend who’d stopped to pick up a girl hitchhiking, then when she turned around, said, ‘Nah, no fricken way,’ and drove off. The girl who told me the story had dark curly hair that sat in a thick fringe down over her eyes, so all you could see were these black lashes, like a tiny little awning. I’d hated her telling me the story, hated that she sided with her boyfriend and not the girl. But I’d also felt a sort of relief that it hadn’t happened to me and so, when the girl shook her thick hair and called the unknown girl a stupid slut, I’d stood silently, watching those thick lashes and the trace of mascara that fell onto her cheeks, making black marks below her eyes. Two dots, like a snake bite.

  Disappointment curdled in my gut, but deeper than disappointment was the sure and certain knowledge that this was what I deserved: a rebuff, failed hope, the dull scuffs of dust on the road. Gravel made a percussive scrape under my toes with each kick of my foot, an angry maraca reminding me of my nonsense. With each scrape I examined my own ridiculousness, sifting examples from the gravel as though panning for gold, fool’s gold. That brief and foolish hour when I had believed myself to be the girl who could leap from that gleaming deck, when I’d imagined myself in a white bikini, smoothly shaved legs, concave stomach, stretched in the sun while sails curved above me in a perfect arc; when I’d allowed myself to hope, to believe I could escape and become, as Sylvie said, something different, something better.

  I walked back to Lameroo Lodge, the steam sticking in my throat, clouding my head. The locals talked about the build-up like it was a living thing, an animal lurking on the periphery of the town, waiting to draw blood. But I could feel it, now, the air straining, swelling with humidity. Dogs I passed—a terrier, a retriever, sharing a lead—had their ears down, slinking close to the ground as though waiting for their owner to snap and raise a fist. It was like walking through a wet velvet curtain, the air soggy and sad on my skin, the sky swelling.

  The white-blond man was sitting on the front step of Lameroo Lodge when I dragged my feet up. I’d tied my shirt beneath my bra, trying to let some air on to my skin. He was on his own, looking down at a notebook, his knees drawn to his chest, and for a minute I just stood and watched him moving his finger across the page like a primary school child. I tried to think of something to say, something that wasn’t stupid, something that Dean Moriarty might say, something cool. I said, ‘Hey.’

  When he smiled, one eye closed slightly, making his face look smaller. And when he said, ‘Do you want to get a drink?’, I felt the disappointment that had wedged in me begin to float away.

  I spent two days looking for more signs for boats on the noticeboard, but there weren’t any. I had no money left and I still didn’t have a plan, or not a proper one. Sylvie had given me a silver bracelet to remember her. It was an antique, passed down through her family, and before she got on the plane she took it off and put it in my hand; I’d always loved the bloom of the two rubies against the silver. I took it to the pawnshop on the corner of the mall, and a blond-bearded man gave me enough to pay for three more nights at Lameroo Lodge. When he handed me the money, his hand was damp. A piece of pastry had wedged in his beard, below his mouth, and when he spoke the pastry piece wagged up and down like a tail, or a sheep’s dag. I said, ‘Don’t sell it. I’ll be back for it. It’s a loan, okay? A loan.’

  He knew that I would not be back.

  I didn’t feel lighter, or richer, when I left.

  Instead of walking back towards Lameroo, I turned the other way along the road and took the long walk to the mooring basin—the Duck Pond—in case another gleaming yacht might show up, looking for an ill-equipped cook who didn’t know how to make beef Wellington.

  Metal frames cut across the sky; trawlers docked alongside each other, their high frames reaching up. More than anything, it made me think of a line of crucifixes: that image of Christ on the hill, the crosses silhouetted against the sky. Ropes and pulleys jangled in time with the lilt of the wind, the call of the harbour. Salt mixed with the tangy smell of fish, sharp and strangely sweet.

  Raw fish, guts, salt, the turn of prawns: it was all there in the smell. Underneath my sandaled foot,
a squish; the head of a prawn, its black eye a savage, desperate bead. I wiped it from underfoot, looking away. There were no beautiful boats looking for cooks, or nannies, or deckhands. There was just the faint wind, making the chains on the boats jangle like church bells.

  On the walk back to Lameroo there was no song of boat stays, just the dull whine of occasional traffic and the pad of my feet on the road, and then on the grass outside the lodge. I saw the bag—made by his aunt, or his mother, or an older cousin in suburban Cairns—before I saw him, bright Hobbytex colours calling, hello, hello. He raised his hand, grinned as though we were old friends, as though we knew each other and were not merely people who had stripped naked and had sex in a shower cubicle after drinking too much bourbon. We’d torn each other raw, tumbling from shower to empty dorm room, throwing each other against any surface we could find, and I felt that I was riding a wave I’d waited for too long to arrive. But there in the open light of the Territory sun I felt stupidly overwhelmed by the self I’d been in the shower cubicle, in the dorm room, in the corridors. Her desire was unseemly. I’d learned that from the trial: that I should be a more contained kind of girl, a more sober kind of girl.

  Raised high, his hand made a flag, beckoning me to land. I smiled back at him and sat on the square of grass he patted.

  Beside him, there was a darker, thinner version of himself. Curls, wide eyes, wide cheeks. But rather than white-haired, sand-skinned, the younger version—sitting cross-legged, grinning at me—was black-haired, skin dark like my brother’s, eyes cow-brown. ‘This is my brother Karl,’ he said.

  I waited for him to tell me his own name, but clearly he thought I would remember. So then I waited for Karl to call his brother something and, after a while, he did.