Well-behaved Women

by Emily Paull

  ‘She seems all right now,’ my father says. ‘But she was really upset when she arrived.’

  ‘She’s been so busy,’ my mother replies. ‘I bet she’s exhausted.’

  ‘We’ll let her sleep, then,’ says Dad.

  I do sleep eventually, but not right away. First, I crawl to the end of my old single bed, to where I’ve stashed my backpack, and I pull out the rolled-up square of carpet. I lean it on the windowsill. It still looks wrong, but in my childhood bedroom, nothing really seems to fit. It is a museum of my life. Photographs document bad haircuts and best party dresses. Posters ripped from magazines are Blu-Tacked to every wall, each one showing a picture of a band—Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Blink-182. In the morning, I will talk to my parents, tell them how I feel. But there’s something else I must do first.

  I reach for my phone on the bedside table and open up a new message to Andy.

  I’m sorry, I say.

  I know he’ll forgive me, even if he doesn’t understand.

  PICNIC AT GREENS POOL

  It felt like we had been banished to the bottom of the world. Tegan drove most of the way because it was her car, and because she got nervous being in the passenger seat on those long stretches where the speed limit was 110. I controlled the radio. For a while, I switched between the CDs I’d found in the folder beneath the seat and a podcast I had downloaded to my phone. After the first few hours, I turned it off completely so we could talk. We talked about a lot of things, but we didn’t talk about what had happened.

  We made it to Albany in the early evening. It was no longer the peak period, though it was still technically summer. The dusty four-wheel drives with Perth number plates were all gone, and the campervans were few and far between.

  My dad’s beach house was on a steep hill overlooking the harbour. It was mine—ours—so long as I did all the cleaning and maintenance work that he’d listed and, I suspected, stayed down there until he felt that he could look me in the eye again. Tegan’s parents hadn’t cared where she went, as long as it was away, and she was going to go and live with her great-aunt in Joondalup for a while, until I suggested she come with me.

  I’d been instructed to paint the house and shampoo the carpets, but the first day we were there, we decided it was too hot and we couldn’t be bothered. Tegan slept late, her long, muscular legs spread out over half of the bed. I woke early and tiptoed out to the kitchen to make myself a cup of tea. When it had brewed, I took it out onto the balcony, which looked down the hill towards the port. I’d slept in all my rings, and there was a dent in my face from one of the bigger ones where I’d slept leaning on my hand. After the drive, I hadn’t changed out of my clothes, only shucked off my jeans and slipped my bra out from under my shirt, pulling one strap out of my sleeve and then the other.

  On the coffee table in the living room, I found an old paperback copy of Robinson Crusoe. I tried to read it while I waited, but I’d never read a duller book. Soon, I gave up, and stared out at the wind farm visible on the cliffs surrounding the bay.

  Tegan emerged around lunchtime. She was already wearing her bathers. Her skin was the colour of thick honey. Her tiny bikini top barely held her breasts. Joining me on the balcony, she folded her arms across them.

  ‘I guess I’ve grown a little,’ she said.

  I shrugged, grinning into the last mouthful of my tea.

  ‘Beach, then?’ she asked, coming to stand behind me, and massaging my shoulders.

  ‘Sure. But it will be freezing.’

  ‘Wuss.’

  * * *

  We drove out to Denmark, to Greens Pool. It seemed strange, to drive for an hour through fields of hay and cows and sheep to get to the ocean. When we arrived, the car park was full, but more cars were leaving than arriving, and we soon found a bay. A solitary pink ice-cream van was parked at the top of the cul-de-sac, and behind the counter, an elderly man with a sea captain’s countenance was reading a second-hand John Grisham novel. He looked up as we passed, but quickly returned to his book when it became clear we weren’t going to buy anything. And we weren’t. The house keys and my mobile phone were in the glove compartment. The only key to the car was secured around Tegan’s throat on a leather band that usually had a silver moon pendant on it.

  The sun was relentless, but there was a light, constant breeze. We made our way down the steep steps into the sand, dodging mothers carrying huge plastic beach bags, children with boogie boards, and a father and son trying unsuccessfully to cart a large yellow canoe up the steps without hitting anyone. The beach itself was a colourful mass of hats and towels. The pool, a sheltered inlet, was surrounded by large smooth rocks, some of which looked exactly like the backs of bathing elephants. People had climbed up onto these and had laid their towels on the surface to sun themselves. Teenagers flipped and bombed into the water from a solitary plinth, whooping and splashing.

  Tegan and I staked out a patch of sand which wasn’t too close to any other groups, careful to stay far away from the pale, overweight dad-type in orange board shorts who had cast his eyes up and down Tegan’s body as we passed him.

  I should have felt awful. I should have been riddled with anxiety about the huge fight I’d had with Mum and Dad. I should have been sad, or at least a little angry. But I was lying on a rainbow-coloured beach towel in the sun, and they were four hundred kilometres away—and so I thought, I’ll be angry later. Tegan was even worse off than me, and she seemed fine. At least in my case, there was a chance my parents would come to terms with what I had done, with who I was, and though I may never be able to live with them again, they would eventually begin to speak to me. Tegan’s father, on the other hand, had said terrible things, words so unforgivable that the weight of them falling upon us was like being pelted with stones. Her mother had stopped acknowledging Tegan altogether. There was something final about the way her parents had reacted, and yet Tegan was behaving as if she were on a summer holiday, sitting in the sand, rubbing sunscreen into her limbs and looking at the sea hungrily.

  * * *

  The night in question, she’d turned up at my house with tears in her eyes and alcohol on her breath. She’d being crying so hard that her voice was hoarse. My parents were already asleep, and the street was dark and silent as I stepped outside and wrapped my arms around her. Somewhere, a neighbour’s dog began to bark. Tegan sniffed and looked up at me, her eyes reflecting moonlight.

  ‘Let’s go somewhere,’ she said.

  I don’t know what time it was, but I grabbed the keys to my dad’s car while Tegan snuck into the pantry and swiped a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the stash. There were so many. He’d never miss one. We wrapped ourselves up in jumpers and got in the car. I just started driving, following my nose, and Tegan never once tried to tell me where to go. She sat in the passenger’s seat with her eyes wide and her bare feet on the dashboard, swigging from the bottle, so the only sounds were the engine and her swallowing.

  In Mosman Park, I stopped at the reserve, and we sat on the bonnet of the car, choking down the bitter alcohol while we watched the blinking lights. The longer we stayed, the more Tegan started to seem like herself.

  ‘I told my parents,’ she said to me.

  I didn’t reply, because I had already told mine, and knew how they had reacted. My parents were like Tegan’s. They didn’t like change.

  I leaned across and kissed her. I wanted to keep kissing her forever, but she began to cry, and I was so frightened that I took the bottle from her and drank.

  ‘Can we keep driving?’ she said.

  My head was light and my heart was heavy. But I got back behind the wheel and drove. I would have driven her to Sydney if she’d asked me.

  Anything to make her happy again.

  * * *

  I stayed on the sand while she raced into the water, not even waiting for the temperature to hit. She waded until the water was deep enough, then dived in. I pulled Robinson Crusoe out of the calico bag we’d piled our towels and T-s
hirts into, but I couldn’t make myself open it. After a while, I pushed it into the sand next to my feet for someone else to find.

  Tegan came racing back up the beach, nearly toppling over as she shivered and pulled her towel around her shoulders. ‘Holy moly,’ she said, laughing. Her green eyes were sparkling from the salt, and her lips had turned purple.

  ‘Walk?’ she suggested, and I couldn’t think of a reason not to. She dragged me to my feet, her cold hand a balm against my roasting skin. We draped our towels around our shoulders and set off along the beach.

  The sand was covered in footprints—human, bird, dog, bare feet, shoes, and what looked like someone running on tiptoe—but they were all going the other way, back to the pool. Tegan ran in and out of the waves. As we came to a large formation of rocks that seemed to mark the end of the beach, I suggested we should turn around, but she simply took off her shoes and began to climb.

  ‘I want to see what’s on the other side,’ she said.

  I sighed, beginning to feel the sting of sunburn on my arms, and picked up her shoes, leaning back against the rock. I could have slept there on the beach, and perhaps I did, but to my knowledge, we had been apart for only a minute.

  When I opened my eyes again, I noticed some gaps in the rock big enough for me to walk through, to see what was on the other side, even though I was laden with all our things. I could no longer see Tegan on the rocks above me. I took off my own shoes, put both pairs into my bag, and began to walk.

  The water was freezing, even these bubbling shallows in the rock pools. I picked my way through a mermaid’s grotto and emerged moments later onto a deserted four-wheel-drive track. Tegan wasn’t waiting for me. Thinking she must have turned back, I turned back too, picking my way through the shallows once more. When I came out onto the beach again, I looked for her along the sand, and up in the dunes. I called her name, but there was no reply. Had we missed each other?

  I ran back through the rocks, still calling her, hoping to catch up with her and stop us both going back and forth. But there was no-one there.

  I dropped our stuff in a pile at the base of the rock she’d disappeared over and started to climb. The top of the rock was empty. I called her name until my throat ached, and then, annoyed that she’d gone off on some jaunt without me, I slid back down the side of the rock into the sand to wait.

  It was there that I found the car key, still on its leather strap.

  I grabbed the key and sprinted back towards the pool. My voice seemed to be torn from my throat as I screamed for help. Everyone stopped. For a moment they just looked at me, and not one of them seemed to know what to do.

  Finally, one of the mums, a toddler balanced on her hip and her arms sticky with sunscreen, hurried over to me. She placed her free hand on my shoulder and forced me to look at her. She spoke to me, I’m sure, but all I could hear was my pulse racing in my ears.

  ‘My girlfriend,’ I choked. ‘My girlfriend is missing, on the rocks at the other end of the beach.’

  While others began to search, the young mum guided me up to the car park, leaving her kid with one of her friends. My hands shook as I unlocked the car. I fumbled for the phone, and though I had bad reception, I managed to call the police. Tucking myself into the passenger seat, I hitched my feet up on the upholstery. Tears snaked their way down my cheeks, and as I rested my head on my knees, I realised that at some point I must have lost our towels.

  ‘Is there anything I can get you?’ the woman asked me, her voice far away, like she was speaking to me from the bottom of a well.

  I shook my head. No-one could get me what I wanted.

  * * *

  The night our parents found out, I think I must have been dreaming when we swerved off the road. The car went through a chain-link fence and bumped down an embankment. Neither one of us was hurt, but the car was a mess, and when the police came, they called our parents. We were holding hands when they came for us. They could have put up with the fact that I was gay, my parents said, if only I didn’t have to be so public about it.

  Now we were losing light. The police sirens grew louder as a patrol car made its way into the car park. The young mother had found me a bottle of water, and she stood there while I drank, washing the taste of blood out of my mouth where I had been biting at the inside of my cheek.

  The two police officers asked me a thousand questions, and a paramedic checked me over, shining a torch into each eye and reading my blood pressure with a cuff. The towels I’d left behind on the beach had been found, but they were soaking and salty, and so the paramedic wrapped me in a foil cape as I sat in the back of the ambulance.

  I remember the wrenching feeling that half of me had been torn away, and then nothing.

  * * *

  Days later, I lay on the bed in our beach house, only moving to go to the toilet and to check my phone. A coordinated search of the beach had turned up nothing. Tegan had simply vanished. No-one was willing to say the word ‘drowned’.

  I had not called my parents, and though it was spiteful of me, I had resolved not to call Tegan’s parents either, because they did not deserve to know.

  The inside of my mouth tasted like sand and salt water and puke. I kept picturing Tegan, stranded out there on the beach when the temperature plummeted overnight. She was only wearing her bathers. Even Robinson Crusoe had more than that.

  When my phone rang, I snatched for it, ripping the charger out of the wall.

  ‘Tegan?’

  ‘Is that Miranda Nolan?’

  I swallowed. It was an official voice, a professional voice, though I couldn’t tell if it belonged to a man or a woman. ‘Speaking.’

  ‘I’m ringing with regard to the missing person you reported in Denmark earlier this week.’ My tongue was so dry, it felt like it might crumble into dust. ‘Did you find her? Did you find Tegan?’

  The ambiguous voice coughed. ‘The thing is, Ms Nolan, we contacted the Sawyers at the number you gave us, and they said they don’t have a daughter.’

  I wanted to spit with rage. How dare they deny she ever existed? How dare they care so little that she’s gone?

  ‘They’re angry with her,’ I said, trying to keep my voice level. ‘They are having trouble accepting that she’s … that we’re—’

  ‘This is a serious matter, Ms Nolan. We’ve checked. There is no Tegan Sawyer.’

  I spluttered into the phone.

  The voice sighed. ‘We’ll be sending an officer around to speak to you shortly, and rest assured we will be doublechecking, but at this stage, we are reasonably certain that there is no missing person to be found. I think it might be best if you let our officer take you in to the hospital. It’s possible you’ve suffered a head injury.’

  My eyes stung with tears and every inch of my body was cold.

  ‘But the car,’ I said. ‘The car is hers, the one I was driving. The officer at the scene took down the plates.’

  A pause. Then, gently, ‘Ms Nolan, that car is registered in your name.’

  I hung up the phone. I put it inside a drawer, and closed it. Then I climbed back into bed and pulled the covers up over my ears. Outside, it was squalling, and I could see the white peaks of waves on the water in the sound.

  * * *

  One week after her disappearance, I returned to the beach. The news story about her, and the apparent hoax it had all turned out to be, had not driven people away from the spot. They were out in droves, dressed in hoodies and jeans and armed with cameras, combing the beach for clues. Individual footprints were impossible to make out in the mess on the sand.

  The day she had disappeared, there had only been two sets of footprints going towards the rocks. Hers, and mine. But the ebb and flow of the tide had taken the marks we’d made, the proof we’d ever been there, and then it had taken Tegan too.

  Retracing our steps, I stood at the base of the rock where I had waited that day and allowed myself to finally think it.

  She’s gone.

  I l
aid the things I’d brought with me—the candle, the silver moon pendant and a bottle of bourbon—at the foot of the rock like a shrine, clearing dark masses of seaweed out of the way. One of the pieces of seaweed wrapped itself around my wrist, and when I brought my hand up closer, I realised that it wasn’t seaweed at all.

  It was Tegan’s bikini top, ripped and dirty, logged with sand.

  FONT DE GRACIA

  She came through customs with her mother’s voice in her ears. Her proud, neurotic, impossible mother. ‘You mustn’t think about that man while you are away,’ the voice said. Grace wanted to ignore it, but it persisted as inevitably as her heartbeat.

  Barcelona Airport was a terrarium—square glass panes for walls and ceiling so the outside world came at her from all directions. Grace walked to the deserted coffee kiosk, followed by the plastic drone of her suitcase wheels. She sat at a table with one chair and pressed her face hard against her palms; a second skin of grease and other-people smells had grown on her like a moss. Grace tried to remember the heavy scent of Stephen’s shower gel. It had been more than a day since she’d stood in the steam of his bathroom, breathing him in like air.

  ‘Mira!’

  Grace jumped, thinking the voice had escaped from her head. Two tables over, a woman got up and hurried towards her, breasts leading the way. She was dressed in floral—reds, pinks, oranges—and her hair was a burgundy mane. The woman held her arms out wide. She hesitated, and then engulfed Grace in a polyblend embrace.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Grace protested, her mouth half-covered by the woman’s arm. ‘I’m not Mira!’

  She sat still, waiting for it to be over. The weight of the woman pressed against her bowed her spine back over the wooden chair she was sitting on.

  As the woman let go, she clucked her tongue and smiled. ‘Doesn’t your mother teach you anything, Gracie? Mira, it means “look”!’

  Grace wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and licked her lips. ‘Are you Sofia Torres?’