Pretty Girls

by Pretty Girls (retail) (epub)

  “Farrrkkkk,” he drew the word out long and hard. “I was never violent Evelyn. You all convinced yourselves that was the case. It’s because you were pieces of shit, your mum didn’t want to work, your brother was a junkie, and you ... well, you know what you were. You need to face up to reality.”

  Back it up with evidence. That’s what G told her she should do. If he dodged, keep coming back to the facts.

  “You never hit us? What about that time you put Benny in the hospital?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It was formal night,” she continued. Her voice didn’t tremble. It held firm. Here it was. Now or never. “Mum was doing my makeup and you came home, called me a whore, and then tried to hit me. Benny came out to pull you off me and you went for him. Broke his knee, his cheek-bone, his sternum ... steel capped boots. You put a hole in his chest.”

  She leaned forward, like she was a journalist, searching for the facts. Like the story didn’t belong to her. But it did. It did.

  He dropped his head to the side sharply and stared at her with dead eyes.

  “He came at me that night. I was just tryin’ to defend myself,” obtuse and belligerent.

  “He didn’t. He was trying to get you off me,” stick to the message.

  “That’s your version of events, not mine,” he turned his face back up to the ceiling. Conversation closed.

  When you imagine conversations in your mind, somehow you never land upon the right outcome. You can imagine what the other person might say, the most likely course of events, but then it never turns out quite to be the case.

  Close but no cigar.

  Leaving you unprepared, again.

  She looked back down at the crumpled serviette. G flashed before her eyes again. Keep going. Don’t let the old bastard get you down. You deserve your answers.

  She picked another question at whim. The one that seemed most appropriate right then. They didn’t have to be in chronological order. They just had to be answered.

  “What about mum? When did you start hitting her? Was it before or after she had us?” there it was, cold and dark, written in black ink on a white serviette. Hanging before them like blown up party letter balloons at a children’s party. Festive almost in their lightness.

  “I never hit your mum.” Lies. Always lies. He was so forthright with his responses that he started to make her question her version of reality. Maybe she had imagined it all along. Maybe she was the crazy person.

  “But you did, Dad. I saw it with my own eyes.” She rarely said the word Dad. But the statement seemed to require the intimacy of the word. He had been their dad, he was their dad but he had never met them with any sort of affection. Not at all. Always malice. Always violence.

  “You’re nuts, Evelyn. What’s that thing you’re holding onto anyway? That thing you keep referring to?” He heaved himself towards her and the list.

  She leaned back so quickly she almost destabilised the chair. She knew him – he would try to take this from her too. The last source of her strength.

  She didn’t respond.

  “What have you got there?” he craned towards her aggressively, so much so that the respirator pulled out of his nose.

  She clutched it in her hand. He continued.

  “What have you got written down?”

  Momentarily, she felt like crumpling the list and stuffing it into her mouth. She didn’t want him to have it. She didn’t want him to even think about it. It belonged to her.

  “Are they the questions you were talking about? You wrote down a fucking list of stupid questions to ask me?” His face crumpled into a disgusting grimace. His skin was paper thin, cheese-like in colour and texture.

  Again, she refused to reveal the answers.

  Instead she glanced down at the list of questions and plucked a third. She read over the line like it was the first time she had seen it. Like it had been penned by someone else and she was just re-iterating the words, sans emotion.

  “Why didn’t you love us Dad?”

  More words. More of their story, darting before them, racing between them, unable to disperse in that sick room.

  “It is a fucking list. What’s come over you Evie? Who’s put you up to this? This isn’t like you at all ” he could smell a rat. Men like Greg, they could smell blood. They knew they were onto the kill. They were sharks.

  She hesitated – he’d called her out. Direct.

  “No-one dad, it’s just me, trying to get to the bottom of things, like I always should have,” the denying made it a reality. Didn’t she know it.

  “There is someone. You seeing someone Evie? Some bloke pulling these strings?”

  She looked down at the list – keep on track.

  “Why did you hate Benny so much? More than me?” The heart of the matter. That was it. Why had he hated her brother so much? Why had he killed him? Didn’t he have any remorse?

  “It is a bloke.”

  The thing about Greg was he was an animal – he had killer instincts. He could zero in on the kill.

  “Who you seeing Evie? You seem to be cagey about it. Like it’s something you know I’d give you shit about.” There it was. He knew her like the back of his hand, even if he didn’t know her at all. The irony.

  “Like I would ever talk to you about my love life,” she said. Again, engaging was a mistake.

  “Who is it? Some dirty Abo or something?”

  Her blood ran cold. It was like he had the devil on his side. Like he could see her cards even though she hadn’t even drawn them herself.

  “Stop it.” The words left her mouth involuntarily.

  “I knew it. It’s a fuckin’ black fella. I can smell him on you. That’s why you stink today.”

  Fuck, she wanted to kill him. She wanted to reach across and squeeze his neck. At that point she didn’t care how much time she would need to do it.

  She lurched towards him violently, hands outstretched, face distorted into a mask of rage. He looked surprised, but amused. Just before her hands made contact with him she stopped. Her heart beat a rapid drum in her chest. She was just like him, she always had been. That’s why she had survived.

  She was frozen in space and time. That’s when he started laughing. Hysterically. Like a galah. He’d bested her, and he knew it. He was a sick cunt.

  “Fuck Evie, you’re the violent one. Can’t you see it?”

  She crumpled the list in her hand, and stood stock still. Get out, get away from him.

  Run, Evie. Run.

  Just don’t listen to any of it. Because it will get under your skin, in your veins, in your bones, and then you’re dead.

  24

  Yelling into the dark

  (1997, Redfern)

  After he left the hospital he wasn’t the same. He disappeared – completely. A vanishing act. Benny had been absent for a long time, but it stepped up a gear, it was almost like he had evaporated. Evie didn’t know where to find him. He’d always been hard to find. He didn’t have “usual” haunts and he didn’t have friends either, other than a few pushers she occasionally found him hanging about. But they weren’t friends, just weedy junkies he would buy his next fix from. He didn’t really have anyone, other than her.

  His room (which had been sparsely populated on an average week) was forlorn. After he was discharged he didn’t come back home. She couldn’t say she was surprised. Nobody talked about him either. Their mum didn’t wonder or ask where he’d gone to and Greg didn’t give a rat’s arse – he was just happy enough nothing had ever come of it. That DOCS hadn’t turned up on the doorstep, or worse still, the cops. Evie didn’t know which was more unforgivable, her father or her mother. He was the perpetrator, but Benny was right, their mum had just stood by and let it happen. Now, she was completely silent on the matter. Like she’d never had a son at all, like she might ask, “Benny, who?” if someone inquired after him.

  Evie was distraught. Her soul ached for him. They’d always been
close, they’d lived inside each other’s pockets and minds ... but things had been different for a while now. Six months had gone past and they’d drifted apart. He’d become defined by the junk, and she had become defined by boys. Nonetheless, the hollow was still there. He was like a part that fitted inside her, without him there was something ragged, something empty, something decidedly missing.

  One afternoon after school she’d run into Pete. Normally she dodged him like the plague. Complete houso trash. He was a pusher and a junkie. Way past the point of return. The type who floated from picking up his dole payment from Centrelink, washing car windows for a couple of dollars and blowing it all on some shard. He was an ice addict -the worst kind. She’d caught him with Benny a few times and always ignored their covert allegiance. Mostly because it said something about her brother that she didn’t care to acknowledge.

  She didn’t like the way he looked at her. In this awful, leery kind of a way. Like it was just a matter of time before she would succumb to him. She knew the type, the kind that thought a pretty girl would do virtually anything for a bag. Even suck off a douche like him.

  That wasn’t her – even she had boundaries.

  That day when she saw him on the corner of Raglan and Elizabeth picking at a scab on his arm she knew that she had to talk to him. She gulped, her throat tight. It was hardly the position she wanted to be in — fishing for information about her brother from Pete the junkie, but she was starting to get desperate. He’d been gone for weeks. No contact. What if something had legitimately happened to him? What if she was the only person who cared?

  “Well, if it isn’t Benny’s little sister,” he’d said comically, his rotten teeth pressing tightly against his bottom lip. He had a terrible over-bite which made him look a little simple.

  He was simple. Mean and simple. A terrible combination.

  “What’s your name again?” he asked. He knew her name. It was just some dumb-boys power-play, a way to put her down. Make her feel like she wasn’t enough. Not even worth remembering her name.

  “Evie,” she said playing along. She sensed he had information that she needed.

  “That’s right, Evelyn.” His pupils were square, he was high as a kite, or coming off something. Always dangerous.

  “Listen, have you seen my brother? He hasn’t come back home in a while,” she asked.

  He stared at her, a silly expression playing on his face, like he knew he was holding all the cards in a game of poker.

  “What’s it worth to you?”

  Of course, the trade. It always came down to an exchange with boys like him. But she wasn’t interested. When she’d traded Craig sex for a ride, she’d been walking the line. So fine. So lightly. Now, she wasn’t, she was skirting it. Besides, Craig was awful but Pete was a step too far. Dog shit. An absolute barnacle. There was no way.

  “Nothing. I just thought I’d ask because I’ve seen you with him before. But I don’t really care,” she said flippantly, with a roll of her eyes. She did care. A lot. But if this was a game of poker she was going to have to bluff it. He was too high to realise he was being played.

  He stared at her again, mouth gaping slightly.

  “Well, I’ll see you then,” she said, turning on her heels. Delivering a message, loud and clear. No fucking way, Pete the junkie.

  “Wait!” he called. Bingo.

  She turned back with the utmost nonchalance.

  “He’s been staying with me.”

  Christ, Benny was staying with Pete? That was bad.

  “I can take you to him?” he added hastily. Desperate to get back in her good books – desperate to get between her legs.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Following him was a gamble. She wasn’t at all sure if Benny was staying with him, or if he was just leading her off somewhere. Boys like him didn’t have any qualms about that sort of thing. It was go at your own peril. The only thing she could rely on was her instinct. Seventeen years of gut instinct and lessons built up on the streets of Redfern. She thought he was telling the truth.

  “Okay,” she said finally.

  She followed him down Raglan Street in the semi darkness of that late afternoon. She kept a few paces behind him as though she didn’t deign walking side by side with him. He was wearing an old Nike tracksuit, blue and red. Snap down pants and a zip hoodie. It was loose and swam on his tiny frame. Standard junkie attire. There was a weird stain on his bottom, and she wasn’t sure if he’d shit himself or sat in a turd. He smelt like either was a possibility.

  At that moment she hated Benny. Why couldn’t he have just run straight? Why did he have to get messed up with people like this guy? Why had he left her alone?

  Pete turned into an abandoned-looking terrace with boarded-up windows and a mauve coloured three-seater couch in the front yard.

  “This is my place,” he turned and told her, as he pushed the door open.

  Instantly she could smell piss. It was dark on the inside, and she was afraid, but she pressed ahead. She had to find him.

  Pete flipped the light switch on and called,

  “Ben! Ben! Your sister's here!”

  The place was a dump – there was a shit-stained mattress on the floor and graffiti on the walls. It was littered with cigarette butts and beer cans. There were used syringes on the ground.

  “Benny!” Pete yelled at the top of his lungs like a deranged person.

  The sound startled something primitive within her. She was scared. Her breathing was ragged, and she fought to keep it under control before Pete smelt the fear on her skin. He would feed off- it.

  She gulped and forced herself forward into that sty of a place. That’s when Benny appeared at the entryway of the lounge room. Thin, pale, wide-eyed. Arms lined with tracks. He wasn’t wearing a shirt – he didn’t even care to conceal his wasted body anymore.

  “Benny!” she called. Despite herself, and despite his miserable state she wanted to run to him and hug him. She wanted to smell his familiar smell, and have his skinny arms around her. Would he still smell the same?

  He looked at her grimly.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded, scratching his arm.

  Pete looked from Benny to her, her to Benny, Benny to her, and then headed into another room like he was decent enough to give them privacy. Pete wasn’t decent at all. He probably just needed another fix.

  “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I haven’t seen you in weeks,” she said aghast that it was even a point of contention.

  “So what? I can’t go fucking home can I?” he said. There was something different about him. Something awfully belligerent, which reminded her of her father.

  “Yes, you can. You need to come home. You can’t stay here,” she hissed at him – like he might have missed the state of affairs he was surrounded by.

  He squinted his eyes tight and shook his head vehemently, like he was having a stroke. His face turned an awful colour of red. She’d never seen a reaction like that from Benny. She’d spent seventeen years with him and she thought she’d seen them all. Not this one. This one was new. She wondered if it was him or the drugs that were owning him.

  “Get out,” he said to her, turning his back.

  “What?” she spluttered, unable to compute his words.

  “Get the fuck out of this house,” he repeated. “Go on then.”

  He pointed towards the door.

  “Benny, stop it. Don’t be ridiculous.” She tried to keep a reasonable tone – like she was in control of the situation, but inside her blood pressure had risen so high she could hear the tide in her ears. The ocean. Threatening to wash her way. Threatening to wash everything away.

  “Fuck you, Evie. You’re just like the rest of them,” he spat at her.

  “I’m not like the rest of them,” she cried, stung by the remark. She’d always had his back. Always. How could he say that to her?

  “You are. Go play house with that violent prick a
nd our dumb mum. Go pretend everything’s okay. I’m not coming with you,” his voice was resolute. He was the one that was in control even if he was high.

  “You can’t stay here,” she repeated, she could feel tears running down her cheeks. She never cried. But this warranted a tear or two. She couldn’t hold them back.

  “Yes, I can. I belong here – between the shit and the piss. I do. I’m shit – that’s what the old man always told me, and you know what? He was right. He was so right. So get your fancy arse out of here, and don’t come back. I don’t want you here.” He turned his back on her and walked away, and switched off the light.

  “Benny! Benny! Benny!” she called.

  But she was just yelling into the dark.

  25

  Children always surprise you

  (2017, Redfern)

  “ Mummy, Mummy,” she felt a familiar tug at her arm. Tilley. She was standing in the kitchen rinsing plates. She glanced down at Tilley’s tiny face, her unruly blonde hair framed it like an unceremonious halo.

  “Mummy, are you ok?” she said, her mouth tugging downwards at the corners.

  “Yes, of course my darling,” she responded. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because you’re crying.”

  Evie reflexively touched her face. Her hands were wet from the dishes, but she could still feel the tears. She hadn’t realised she had been crying.

  “You were crying loudly mummy,” Tilley continued. “Sobbing.”

  Evie hadn’t realised. She had been thinking about Benny and Pete. The memory had remained unsurfaced for year. Now that she touched it, she discovered it had ragged edges, and it had made her bleed on the inside. The tears were an outward manifestation.

  She dried her hands on the tea-towel, and wiped the tears away with closed fists.

  Pain needed to be felt, she decided. For years she had been resisting the emotions that came with those memories. She had blocked them out so she didn’t need to feel. But they had dammed up everything inside her. It had made it impossible for her to feel anything at all. Now she knew she had to. She had to unwrap them ever so gently to find herself. She just hoped she could do it tenderly. She was afraid of smashing everything in the process. Everything that was left.