Well-behaved Women

by Emily Paull

‘Hey, Amy. It’s Jack.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. Suddenly, it felt weird to be naked. ‘Hey, Jack. What’s up?’

  ‘I was just ringing about Bunbury. Shelley can’t make it. She’s going to Bali.’

  ‘What? But she bought a ticket.’

  ‘That’s fine. I bought it off her.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For my friend Kira. You don’t know her, she’s a uni friend.’

  I drew the towel around me tighter. Tales of Jack’s sex life always made my skin crawl. He was prone to over-sharing, and, I suspected, over-exaggeration.

  ‘Do I need to get an extra room? Or will she be okay bunking with me?’

  ‘Actually … she’s going to bunk with me. I was ringing to see if you’d be okay bunking with Cam.’

  ‘There’s only one bed in those rooms!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So! It would be weird me sleeping in the same bed as Cam.’

  ‘No weirder than me doing it. Just take separate sleeping bags and get changed in the bathroom. We’ve had sleepovers in the same room lots of times. Get over yourself.’

  I inclined my head, conceding his point.

  ‘I met her in my elective photography class. She’s from Singapore, and her parents are really rich, but she’s so down to earth. She loves music and old films, and she has really nice clothes.’

  I gathered my wet hair in my free hand, twisting it up onto my head. ‘Sounds like you like her.’

  ‘I do. I was starting to think I’d never get a girlfriend.’

  ‘So, what are you going to do? Ask her out?’

  ‘Nah. I just want to see what happens. In Bunbury, you know? It could be romantic.’

  ‘In Bunbury?’

  ‘It could happen.’

  I nodded, biting my lip.

  ‘Seriously, she’s perfect,’ he said. ‘I just want everything to go smoothly.’

  ‘It will, Jack,’ I said. ‘Be yourself.’

  We hung up, and I got dressed for bed. A few hours later, the screen of my phone lit up once more. This time, it was a text message.

  Why is it you girls never go for the nice guys?

  * * *

  The area in front of the main stage was packed, but we had a strategy. Wherever we went, the boys formed a wall behind me and Kira, which meant we went unsquashed, and we never got stuck where we wouldn’t be able to see.

  I was beginning to warm to Kira. As we got out of the car in Bunbury, she slipped me a foil pack of Panadol and some tissues without a word. We held hands and shimmied to Vampire Weekend, talking about books between songs. Our rain ponchos crinkled in the wind. Kira occasionally raised Sigmund to her eye and took photos of us, of Cam pulling silly faces, and me striking poses like I was Kate Moss at Coachella.

  Jack watched the proceedings with his arms folded and his head tilted to one side, like the whole day was one of his board games, like he had to strategise.

  During Miami Horror, a guy tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Hey, man. Can we stand in front of you? My girlfriend can’t see!’

  The guy was small but muscular, with a triangular goatee and a tattoo of a dragon on his bicep. Jack stared at him and didn’t reply. After a while, the couple moved to get in front of him anyway, placing themselves between Jack and Cam, and Kira and me.

  Jack took one look at Kira and then shoved the guy, trying to move him away from us. ‘Hey, man, fuck off. We were here first!’

  The guy shoved him back, harder. Jack stumbled into Cam and he righted himself, eyebrows slanted.

  ‘Fuck you, mate,’ the guy said, showing Jack his middle finger. His girlfriend grabbed him by the shirt, holding him back.

  ‘Are you fucking stupid? I said find somewhere else to stand!’ The man turned to say something to his girlfriend, and she stood aside. He then rushed at Jack with his fists bunched up.

  ‘Don’t!’ I cried, running in towards them.

  Cam grabbed me by the arm and Kira by her camera strap, and pulled us both out of the way just in time. The girlfriend squealed as fist connected with face. Jack went down like a falling tree.

  ‘Jack!’ yelled Kira. She shook free of Cam’s grasp and ran at the guy, her finger pointing like a school teacher’s. ‘Get out of here before we call security.’

  ‘Hey, he started it!’

  ‘Get lost!’ she screamed.

  Cam was kneeling by Jack, shaking him. He was lucid, but his eyes were full of tears, and there was a red mark on his jaw.

  I stood there, frozen.

  ‘Let’s get him to first aid,’ said Cam, gesturing at me. Together, we pulled Jack to his feet.

  He shook his arms to throw us off. ‘Forget this,’ he muttered.

  As he loped away, it started to pour.

  * * *

  He found us in the car park, waiting for him, a few hours later.

  The music had been over for almost an hour, and the car park was nearly empty. It was dark, and the wind was brutal, shrieking through the trees on the edges of the reserve.

  ‘Are you okay?’ said Kira.

  ‘Yep. Let’s go. It’s cold.’ His nose was pink and his teeth were chattering. He wouldn’t look any of us in the eye. A bruise had begun to blossom on his chin, his lower lip was swollen, and he stank of cheap vodka.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Around. Went for a walk. Needed to clear my head.’ He fished his car keys out of his pocket.

  I eyed them, wondering whether or not he was okay to drive, and whether or not I should say something.

  Cam beat me to it. ‘I’ll drive. You must be knackered from the trip down.’

  ‘Whatever,’ said Jack, shoving the keys at Cam, hitting him in the middle of the chest.

  ‘Are you still upset about that guy? It wasn’t your fault,’ I said, putting my hand on his arm.

  ‘I’m not upset. And of course it wasn’t my fucking fault.’

  I shut my mouth.

  ‘There’s no need to speak to her like that,’ said Cam.

  ‘If she wasn’t being such a bitch, I wouldn’t have to.’

  ‘Hey!’ I called out. I advanced on Jack, and he turned his body away, blocking me. ‘What is your problem?’

  He didn’t answer.

  Cam unlocked the car, and I climbed in the back with Kira. Jack got in the front seat without another word to any of us. Cam put his earphones in and started the car, though how he could concentrate on any more music after the day we’d just had, I don’t know.

  * * *

  The next morning, after we’d packed the car, the four of us sat on a patch of grass and daisies, sipping lukewarm instant coffee. We were all hung-over with fatigue and sick to death of each other.

  Jack picked a daisy from among the weeds and handed it to Kira. She smiled and tucked it behind her ear.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said to me, holding her fingers up in a peace sign. ‘Could you take my picture?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  She handed Sigmund to me.

  ‘You look beautiful,’ said Jack.

  Kira looked at the ground and sighed. ‘You should apologise to Amy,’ she said.

  Jack stiffened. His eyes darted between the two of us. ‘I’m not going to.’

  ‘And that,’ said Kira, ‘is why we could never be together.’ She took the flower from her hair and handed it to me.

  ‘Your turn,’ she said. ‘I want to take your picture too.’

  I tucked the flower into a bobby pin and stood still as Kira took my picture. My smile in that picture was genuine, although I never saw it—or her—again.

  DOWN SOUTH

  Woodsmoke hung thick in the air like incense. Her dad had always said that May was a brittle month. That was how her whole body felt—so brittle with cold that any sudden movement might snap her limbs off like the legs from a gingerbread doll.

  Caitlin had complained about the Margaret River cold to Aaron once, on one of her visits, and he had just laughed. He said peopl
e from Perth were wimps, and she’d gone soft since she moved there—she didn’t know what cold was. He’d been waxing down his battered green surfboard on the front lawn, a nub of beeswax in his hand, while she sat on the letter box swinging her legs. His wetsuit had been unzipped to the waist and a shark’s tooth hung from a leather strap around his neck. How old had they been then? Thirteen? Fourteen? She’d come home for the WA Day long weekend every June since the move, right up until Year Eleven, but her memories of the trips had started to blur together. Whenever it was, it was a long time ago—she hadn’t been back in a while.

  She stepped into the pub and stood by the door, looking for a place to sit. Some girls in skinny jeans and high-heeled boots were picking up their bags to leave, so she hurried over and saved him a stool by resting her pink beanie on it.

  A waitress approached. She ordered an orange juice. When it arrived, the glass immediately began to sweat rings onto the coaster, suffering under the aggressive hum of the heater on the wall. She longed to take a sip. Her throat was so sore from the smoke and the cold. Aaron wouldn’t be far away. She sat on her hands and waited.

  Each time the door behind her opened, bringing with it a sudden whorl of cold and noise, Caitlin looked up ready to smile. But each time, it was someone else. These people were so unlike him. She realised that the place she’d chosen had become a tourists’ pub, one where all the townies drank on their weekends ‘down south’. No-one in the bar was wearing flannelette, or jeans with thongs, and there was not one blonde head wet from the surf. There were only suit jackets and expensive shoes and the occasional flashy engagement ring.

  Real estate agents, Caitlin thought to herself. I am surrounded by real estate agents and bank managers.

  The roar of noise grew as a large group arrived from the car park and pulled stools around a table made out of an old wine barrel. They layered themselves two-people deep. Caitlin watched a young waitress in a black singlet attempt to pass them with a tray of drinks. It was as if Caitlin were the only person who could see or hear her. After a few moments of excusing herself, the waitress tried to get past by going through an indoor garden bed made up of smooth river stones and a vine-covered trellis creeping up the exposed brick.

  Just as she took her first step, one of the men reached a pivotal point in his story and he threw his arms and head back, smacking the girl across the face, right under her eye. A wine bottle in a metal bucket and ten empty glasses crashed to the floor. The group went silent. The girl pressed her fingers to her eye. She picked herself up and, blushing, apologised to the man who had knocked her down. A sneer curled his top lip. ‘Clumsy,’ he muttered, just loud enough for everyone to hear.

  Caitlin considered picking up her beanie and walking over to the man to say something. That’s what Aaron would have done.

  But she wasn’t Aaron. She wasn’t even a local anymore. Instead, she stared at these strangers until her orange juice was warm, and then gulped it down in one long thirsty breath, allowing herself to admit that Aaron wasn’t coming.

  * * *

  Had she sensed that something was off when they’d spoken on the phone? It was the first time in nine years that she’d been able to bring herself to call, yet she still knew his number off by heart. She hadn’t realised talking to Aaron would be so hard—or that it would make her think about so many painful things.

  But she missed him, and she missed them. She still thought of him as her best friend. She’d told him that she was coming for a visit and then held her breath while she waited for him to respond, wishing she had a glass of wine to fortify herself with. He’d said, ‘Cool, all right’, in the same way he always did, and the knot in her gut slowly began to unclench. It was Caitlin who suggested they grab a pub dinner, and Aaron had agreed. When she asked about his mum, Aaron said that he had to go.

  After they’d hung up, she’d gone to her computer to look up whether or not he was on Facebook. He was. He was single—not that this mattered, she was just curious. He was teaching a Nippers surf group on Sunday mornings. She clicked through photo after photo of him posing with his class, each of them wearing pink hats that tied under the chin, with white teeth, and yellow zinc on their noses. He wasn’t studying. He was a vegetarian. The friends who posted on his wall had names like Clarkey and Rainbow and Sharif, and for the most part it was all just invitations to hang out at someone’s house or to see a band at Settlers or to go skating at the park near the high school. Was this his life? He seemed so normal, so young. It was as if none of it had ever happened.

  Almost a decade had gone by. They were both twenty-five now. Caitlin’s friends from Perth were starting to post things about getting engaged or going overseas or buying their first blocks of land. Two of them already had children. But life in her old home town didn’t seem to have changed at all, and it made her ache in a place deep within.

  * * *

  On the drive back to the place where she was staying, Caitlin took a wrong turn and went the long way, realising as she drove down a long dark street, twenty kilometres under the speed limit, that she was heading for her old house.

  It was still there, but it no longer faced onto an open, empty block. Her old room now had a view of a row of houses, lined up like false teeth, part of a complex of short-stay housing accommodation. They weren’t new either—she hadn’t lived there since she was ten.

  Caitlin’s mum got sick just before her tenth birthday. Her family had come to Perth to be near a specialist, but it hadn’t helped. A few months after the move, Caitlin’s mum died.

  At the Perth house, they’d had a trampoline and a swimming pool, and she’d gone to a school where she had to wear a dark green ribbon in her hair. Her dad had tried, but his French braids were never as good as she wanted them to be. Caitlin begged him to take her back to the old house, but he was sad all the time, and he said it was important for them to stay in Perth, to stay near Nanny and Poppy. He said it was for her sake, but she didn’t believe him. Her father treated her like she was a different species—to study and observe, and marvel at the things she did that he didn’t understand. He kept his distance when it came to ‘girl stuff’, assuming she’d ask her grandmother or her friends if she had questions.

  She wrote letters to Aaron until she got to high school, when her dad bought her a computer and she was able to talk to him every night on MSN Messenger. She would leave it signed in while she did her homework, waiting for the dissonant three-note chime which told her she had a new message, changing her display name to reflect the lyrics of the songs she was listening to, sometimes signing in and out to see if he’d notice.

  Aaron’s house wasn’t far from her old house. Tears prickled in the corners of her eyes as she thought about driving there and asking him why he’d stood her up. She imagined him opening the door and saying, ‘Oh shit, Cait, that was this weekend? I’m so sorry.’ But his mum was probably there, and Caitlin wasn’t sure how much Aaron might have told her, or what she might have guessed.

  * * *

  The year she turned sixteen, her father took her to Margaret River for the long weekend as usual. He took Nanny and Poppy out to a winery for lunch, but Caitlin had begged to be left behind to hang around in the town instead. She wanted to walk all the old walks, get a milkshake at the Fudge Factory and pretend that she still lived there. Her father had surprised her by agreeing, and gave her a twenty-dollar note.

  The milkshake was sickly sweet and made the insides of her mouth feel waxy. It was cold, and the sky was overcast as if it might rain at any moment. She had nowhere to go, so she huddled under the gazebo in the park and stared across the road, wishing she’d brought her Discman. After a while, she wandered towards the oval in the direction of the skatepark.

  He’d always had unnaturally long dark eyelashes. If it hadn’t been for his eyes, he might have been just another tall, broad-shouldered boy, practising grinds on the edge of the bowl. But despite how different he looked on the outside, he was the same person she had wai
ted hours to speak to every night, the one who had once wet himself in her sandpit. The same boy who had been her first kiss under the slide in the playground in Year One. She looked different too. She had a proper girl’s body now.

  Out in real life, they had become strangers again. Her stomach began to dance, and her legs and lips tingled. She couldn’t speak. He smiled at her, and her palms grew damp and sweaty. She scraped the dampness off them with her jeans.

  ‘Caitlin?’

  She smiled so wide that her cheeks ached. ‘Hi.’ He rode his board down into the centre of the bowl and braked, kicking the board up into his hands with a practised movement. She raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged with false modesty.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s the long weekend. We always visit.’

  Aaron raked a hand back through his hair, flattening it. ‘Shit, yeah, so it is.’

  He ran up the side of the skate ramp and wrapped one arm around her. She could smell salt on his skin, like he’d just come out of the water.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ she forced herself to say.

  ‘I’ve missed you, Cait,’ he replied.

  Caitlin looked at him looking at her and realised there was something more than friendship between them—something that hadn’t been there before. It was so obvious. Aaron was in love with her. Had been waiting for her to notice. Now, he was playing it cool. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and wondered how she could have been so stupid for so long.

  She ran through it all in her mind as they walked back to his house together. She’d always known that Aaron was handsome, but this attraction—this magnetic pull which seemed to originate somewhere below her hips—this was new. Her breathing slowed as she concentrated on brushing the back of her hand against his. The power in such a simple gesture. As their skin touched, an electric shock shot from her neck to her navel.

  Aaron let them in via the back door. When they reached his room, Caitlin felt like she might cry. Though everything about this room had grown up as Aaron had, there was a smell that had always belonged to Aaron’s house, and experiencing it again was like arriving home after a long journey. Coffee and oranges and washing detergent and something earthy. An early morning smell.