An Aboriginal woman wept near the gurney. She covered her face with her hand – Evie could only imagine it was his mother. The grief was intense. Overwhelming. It obliterated everything else.
“We should go,” G said to her, taking her by the arm and starting to lead her away, but her feet were rooted to the spot. She knew that he was trying to be respectful. But what did he know about anything of this anyway? Nothing at all. He couldn’t know the grief as intimately as she did. He couldn’t understand at all.
He tugged her gently now but more urgently, but she brushed him aside. Focused on the body as it was wheeled onto the ambulance, and the woman, who was now screaming next to it. She had to watch it all. To the bitter end – until the doors closed behind them. She wished she could get in the ambulance with them. She wished she could watch as a quiet spectator of human emotions a few metres away. She would have stared at the woman’s face to memorise the reaction. She would have wiped her tears with her hand and tasted them, to know what they tasted like. She would have touched the flesh of the boys skin, to know if it was already ice cold. She would have peeled the sheet away from his face to see his final expression. Was it peaceful? She wanted to know. She wanted to know all those details. She hadn’t been allowed that knowledge. She hadn’t found him. They had taken him away before she’d had a chance to see him. To throw her arms around him. To hold him close. To love him.
She’d never seen him ever again.
They closed the doors behind the mother and her son. The paramedics had climbed into the front seat, and started to drive away. The police officers had milled about the crowd looking to break it up.
“Evie,” G had said to her. His kind voice near her ear. “We should go.” But she didn’t want his kindness. Not now, maybe never again she realised. How stupid of her to think that she could get away from this – how ridiculous had it been to think that she could find a place where the memories all peacefully coexisted. What a rookie mistake. There was no getting away from what had happened. It taunted her on a daily basis, weaving its way into her reality. Desperately wanting to be acknowledged.
She had a bitter taste in her mouth. Like she might double over and vomit.
Things had started to spin around her quickly. Forms didn’t seem like forms anymore. Everyone seemed discombobulated. Moving heads, darting in and out of her field of vision. Waves of nausea. A terrible sense of panic.
She pushed away from G, she needed to get away from this place quickly. She staggered up Phillip Street, and then more quickly her feet started picking up pace. She was running, fast. The cool air hit her face and stung her cheeks. It reminded her that she was still alive. Past her house – she wouldn’t stop there. She had to get far away.
The traffic surged around, and behind her she would hear the heavy pounding of feet.
“Wait! Wait!” G’s voice, barely discernible over the noise in her head and the traffic.
He grabbed her by the arm and whipped her around. She struggled against him. She didn’t want to stop. She didn’t want to be near him or anyone at all.
His mouth was moving but she couldn’t hear the sounds that were coming out. She didn’t care what he was saying. Her mind played a cruel trick and refocused on him.
“What’s going on? What’s happening here?” He demanded, his hands holding her tight. Like he’d never let her go – and he was so strong. So much stronger than she was.
“Let me go,” she managed between clenched teeth, struggling against him.
“No, not until you tell me what’s going on,” he continued insistent.
She grew desperate. She pounded her hands against his chest – and pushed with all strength. “Let go of me!” she yelled.
She realised that people were staring at them. She was cognisant enough to know what this might look like. An Aboriginal man hurting a white woman. He must have realised that much too, because he dropped his arms, and held them up. A show of vulnerability. That he wasn’t the aggressor. That’s the thing about stereotypes. They’re persistent, and commonly held. How stupid of them both to think otherwise. To think they could get past this.
“Okay, I’ll stop,” he said calmer now, although still breathing heavily from the run and the sudden struggle. “Just tell me what’s going on. I won’t leave you otherwise. Not until you’re safe and at home.”
How gentlemanly of him. How kind. She wanted him to stop being kind. Stop the fuck being kind. Kindness didn’t belong here. And she didn’t want to be safe. Not at all. If there was ever a moment to self-destruct. This was it. She was going to go out with a bang. The loudest she could imagine.
But she knew she had to tell him the truth to get away. There were no other options. She’d already uttered them once today. She could say them again.
“My brother killed himself. Benny did. It was a suicide, just like that kid. A belt. When I were seventeen,” there it was. Nicely articulated for him. Tied up with a bow.
He stopped. His breath quietened. The world slowed down around them. They were in an incubator of sorts. Being baked into a terrible nightmare of a thing.
“You told me you weren’t close anymore,” he said. That beautiful voice. The one she would have to say goodbye too.
“We’re not,” she laughed suddenly. Hysterically. “Because he’s in the ground. Dead. Has been for a long time.”
Silence. His eyes on hers and nothing else.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally. Like they always did. They were always sorry. She couldn’t imagine why. It hadn’t happened to them.
She nodded and rolled her eyes irreverently.
He reached a hand out to her, but she stopped it before it made contact with her skin.
“Please don’t touch me.”
He nodded his head and swallowed hard.
“Can I at least walk you home. I need to make sure you’re safe.” So very kind.
“I don’t want to be safe.”
“It doesn’t matter. I need you to be. Tilley does too.”
That’s right, Tilley. She had brought her into this awful mess. And now it was starting to stain her too. It was turning her white skin, red. With the blood and violence of this ridiculous place.
“Okay,” she said finally.
She let him walk her home. She didn’t say goodbye. She opened and closed the door behind her. He stood by that door for hours, maybe longer.
Maybe he didn’t leave at all.
36
Nightmares
(Dreamspace)
She couldn’t sleep that night – or maybe she did sleep? It was a feverish dreaming – she was in and out of reality. In fact she didn’t know what was real anymore. Everything was bleeding together in some sort of terrible intangible, but very material nightmare. Sometimes she was standing in the kitchen, sometimes in bed, sometimes wandering the corridor, sometimes sitting on the floor in the bathroom. She clawed at her skin, and pulled at her hair. She rocked and cried. Maybe, she had taken a pinger, or some ice? Maybe she had just morphed into her brother without realising it.
Then she was out on the street and it was daylight again. She was seventeen year old Evie, with shiny blonde hair, bright blue eyes and skinny tanned limbs. Just a few inches too short – otherwise she could have been a model, or an actor, a star. She was seventeen year old Evie – who felt like shit but looked like gold.
On the inside she was dead. Her heart had stopped beating and her blood had coagulated, thick in her veins. Concrete. Her mind was dull and on repeat. She was wearing her uniform but she hadn’t been to school. She kept going through the routine. Waking up, putting her uniform on, eating her breakfast, leaving the house ... and that’s where it would end. She would just wander. She didn’t know why? Maybe, she was expecting Benny to turn the corner of one of those familiar streets and walk back into her life. Like he would just materialise with that junkie swagger of his. Maybe. What she knew was, she didn’t belong at school with those kids anymore. Mirela, Craig, Adam and all the
rest. There was a giant gulf between her and them. They were normal kids, about to graduate, preparing for the life that lay ahead of them – and her life was already over, she was already dead.
She might be young, but she was aged already.
Benny hadn’t turned the corner of Raglan street (and he never would again) but Pete did. He was high, she could tell, from the look on his face, and the way he staggered about. Lost in his mind, just like her. Perhaps their minds met somewhere else, on a different plain, where people like them (who had lost their minds) existed – because he looked up at her. His face registered recognition. He knew who she was. She stopped moving. Struck by conflicting emotions. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him, or if she never wanted to see him ever again. There was a powerful duality – and there was no space between. He wandered up to her with that strange expression on his face. One eye semi-closed, the other wide open. He kept walking, like he might walk straight through her, and for a moment she thought he might not be able to see her at all. But he stopped, inches away from her face. He smelt rank. He stood there swaying in front of her for a couple of seconds, like he’d forgotten why he was there. Finally, he spoke.
“Looking for your brother, are you?” he asked her. She closed her eyes, the scent of his fetid breath almost overpowered her. She didn’t respond.
“Good, because he’s not around. He’s fucking dead.”
Again she said nothing.
“Found him in my house. Swinging from a belt. His face was black. Like an Abo,” the final words were said aggressively, and spit flew from his lips and landed on her face. It turned her stomach to be touched in anyway by him.
“You know, right?”
She nodded her head, hoping he would stop.
“Fucking drop kick, always causing trouble. The cops been around at my place now asking questions about things ...” he trailed.
What were the things? Was that the trouble he had been worried about?
What were the things? She screamed internally.
There was no point saying it aloud. He wouldn’t tell her, she knew that much.
“You want something? A bag?” he continued, fingering his face with dirty fingers. “I won’t charge you .. don’t worry.” He leant towards her and touched her skin with one of filthy digits.
“You’re a pretty thing.” A strange expression crossed his face. Like he was trying to look charming, but it came across disjointed and weird.
She took a few steps back. The physical contact forced her into movement.
“Not like your brother. Ugly fucking cunt." Face angry now. Ice addicts. Wild as fuck. They shifted from sweet to aggressive in the blink of the eye. She could see the look in his eye. Violent. Crazy. Walk away.
She turned and started walking swiftly away from him. It took him a moment to realise she was going and then he started screaming – at the top of his lungs. Shrill.
“Where you going, bitch? Where you going?”
It was broad daylight and people were starting to stare.
Get home Evie. Get home. Close the door. Lock yourself in. It was the only place that was reasonably safe to her anymore. Maybe that’s why her mother never left? Maybe she was afraid of all of this?
“Hey bitch, I’m talking to you, come back,” more screams.
There was a break in the traffic so she hot-footed it across the street. Put a street between him and you. The voice of self preservation in her mind had kicked in.
“Bitch, you think you’re better than me? Not even close. You’re just like your brother. A stupid, greedy cunt. And I’m going to fuck you – just like I fucked him. Only harder,” he laughed at the grotesque words. Like they were hysterical.
“I’ll get what I want. I always do.”
His voice was getting quieter, which meant he wasn’t following. Her heart was pounding in her chest and she could feel the tears falling down her face, dropping in an arc towards the ground. The streets of Redfern, where all types of shit went down.
“You should have seen him. Dead. What a joke. His tongue was sticking out hard. Like a spaz. He had tongue stiffy,” he laughed more.
She wanted to block the words from her head. Pretend she hadn’t heard any of them. Erase them – but there they were.
She could never go back.
She could never be the same person.
This was the end.
She was seventeen years old and her life was over.
37
Nightmares continued
(Dreamspace)
Then she was in Melbourne. Frankston to be exact. An awful suburb in Southern Melbourne, about forty minutes away from the city. Filled with the down and out, the no-hopers, the ones who had given up, and the ones who had never had any to begin with. Junkies, dole-bludgers, eighteen-year-old suburban housewives and tradie husbands who were dealing all sorts of shit. Anything that came off the back of the truck.
... and Evie. Halled up in a two-bedroom fibro unit. Benny was long gone and so was her mum. She would have been all of twenty-two, and her hair still shone blonde, her eyes glistened blue, and her limbs were still slender. The pretty girl. Always. No matter how it felt on the inside.
Strange thing is, you can take off – run away from a place, and turn up in a new one, but somehow things always turn out the same. Same people, just different faces. She wasn’t working and she was living with Neil. He was a tradie, a plumber to be exact, kind of handsome, sandy haired and green-eyed. Tall, strong, not mean as fuck, but not nice either. Not the kind of guy she should have been with. Not because he hit her or treated her that bad -because he didn’t – he just wasn’t that nice to her either.
Tilley’s dad.
She was at home that afternoon. Low riding jeans and jumper, bare-footed. Doing nothing. She did a whole lot of nothing a lot these days. It wasn’t even occupied nothing. She didn’t watch television, or make food, or clean the house – she just sat there and stared at things. For hours at a time. She tried to think she wasn’t turning into her mum, so she stopped watching old movies. That was enough, right? To separate them. And she didn’t take the meds. Of course not. That was never her thing, it never would be.
Neil had come home at about three o’clock – wearing his work gear. People would have said he was handsome. That’s what she’d thought initially, briefly. Now she just looked straight through him. She looked through everyone.
She was sitting on the couch, staring. She could hear him moving about the apartment. Loudly. His work boots clanging against the floor boards. That reminded her of Greg. But he wasn’t like Greg. He wasn’t that bad. It was just neither of them should have been in a relationship. Neither of them understood each other, and neither was willing to learn how.
“Evie! Evie!” he called loudly from the entrance to the living room. Her eyes were cast down to that hideous shag pile peach carpet – and then they flicked back up to him.
“Evie! Are you there? Fuck, you’re just staring into space again,” his brow was furrowed and he looked angry. She wasn’t sure why, she hadn’t done anything to annoy him. She’d just been here, sitting. But maybe that was enough. She wasn’t sure.
“What have you done all day? Just sat here?” he gestured towards her angrily. Had she? She had sat here, and in the bedroom. She’d smoked a few cigarettes outside and knocked back a coffee. She didn’t think that was an adequate response, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“Evie, you can’t go on like this anymore. You’re fucking depressed or something. You need to see someone. You can’t just sit here all day. I can’t keep paying the bills while you do nothing.” He was right. He wasn’t clever or particularly discerning, but he was right on this occasion. She was depressed. Hard core depressed. Had been for a long time. But she didn’t want to see anyone. There was no use. There was no way out of this.
“Evie!” he yelled, as though the tone of his voice might jolt her back to reality. It didn’t. “We can’t go on like this anymore. I can�
�t go on like this. You need to leave,” he added.
There it was. She knew it was coming. Eventually. How long could she keep trading him emotionless sex for a place to stay and food on the table? It had to come to an end. It was just a matter of time. Always. Where would she go?
She was pregnant then already. She knew it – Neil didn’t. He would tell her to get rid of it. He’d repeatedly asked her to go on the pill. Told her he didn’t want kids, that he wasn’t ready for it, and if she got pregnant it wasn’t his responsibility. Just like that, he’d absolved himself of all of it. Not the sex but the consequences. Men always did. Now, there was something growing inside her. She hadn’t taken the test yet, but she knew it. She’d skipped her period twice, and while she wasn’t showing yet, her breasts felt swollen and heavy – she felt different. Like she had done on the other occasion, with Michael. Same as Neil, just different face. He’d told her to get rid of it, and she had, hoping he’d stick around. But he hadn’t.
The thing was, when you looked like her, there were always guys. They just weren’t nice guys. She could keep churning through them if she needed to. This time was different. She wouldn’t do it again. She wouldn’t get rid of that tiny thing inside her. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t particularly religious, she wasn’t ready to have a child either, but something about that baby called to her. Like she was there for a reason. Like she wanted to come into this world. Somehow she knew it was a girl. She could sense it.
She would have to give up the cigarettes. She’d have to find a job. She’d have to pull herself together and stop fucking staring.
Pretty Girls Page 17