Hitch

  The girl was right there across the aisle. She knelt in front of a rack, flicking through neon-coloured hair accessories. She looked up, craning her neck to follow Amelia’s movements past her.

  ‘Hi,’ the girl said.

  ‘Hey,’ Amelia said, and her own voice seemed to echo in her ear. The girl scurried along behind her.

  Sandra had recovered herself. She held her chin high, and her smile was warm and apologetic. ‘All sorted?’ she said as she scanned the barcode on the box.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ Amelia said.

  The girl grabbed a packet of jelly beans, stared into the clear plastic window. She took them to Amelia, held them up. ‘Can I have these?’

  ‘No,’ Amelia said.

  The girl was wounded.

  ‘Hey,’ Amelia said. ‘Why don’t you choose a postcard for me off that rack?’

  ‘Really?’ The girl said.

  ‘Sure.’

  The girl scampered over and spun the rack fast. She stopped it suddenly, plucked a card, and then continued spinning. Once she’d selected two cards, she held them up, drawing them close then holding them at arm’s length as she deliberated. ‘This one,’ she said, shoving the rejected card into the wrong slot before running back to Amelia.

  ‘Good choice,’ Amelia said. Four images detailed the changes of Crystal Brook’s main street through its history.

  Sandra scanned the card. ‘That’ll be forty-two seventy-five.’

  Amelia grabbed her yellow envelope of cash. She handed over three twenties.

  The till popped open. ‘Have a wonderful afternoon,’ Sandra said, placing the change in Amelia’s hand. She lingered, closing Amelia’s fingers over the money, holding on to her fist.

  ‘Bye,’ Amelia said, lowering her hand. The girl nestled into Amelia’s hip as she turned around from the till. Amelia lifted her arm and let it hover over the child before resting her hand on her bony shoulder.

  ‘Whatcha get?’ The girl said as they walked out the door. Lucy stood in welcome, the wag of her tail slow in the heat. ‘What is it, what is it, what is it?’ the girl said, tugging at Amelia’s T-shirt as she put her money away.

  ‘It’s private.’ Amelia hoisted her bag onto her knee, twisted it round to her back. The girl made a lunge for the paper package; Amelia held it up in the air, out of reach. The girl jumped, giggling, swiping the air above her head. Lucy spun around and barked, eyes on the package too.

  The girl stopped, short of breath. Through her laughter, she said, ‘Just show me, pleeeeease …’ She pointed her chin up, her eyes bright and flitting over Amelia’s face as if searching for weakness.

  ‘It’s an adult thing, not something for you to worry about,’ Amelia said, unable to avoid smiling back at the girl.

  ‘But I know about … sex and stuff.’ The girl bluffed her way through the word ‘sex’.

  ‘Were you listening to my conversation in there?’ Amelia said.

  The girl crinkled her nose. ‘Is it like a tablet that takes it away once you’ve done it?’

  Amelia straightened her shoulders and took hold of her straps to still her trembling hands. ‘It’s a little bit like that. It doesn’t take it away, but it stops you from having a baby.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s what I meant.’

  Amelia turned and took a last look at the gnome inside the glass doors: the red hat, the blushed cheeks. Beyond that, the pharmacist stood behind the counter and she caught his eye by mistake. She turned and walked down the ramp, sweat prickling at her temples. The girl followed, pulling on a loose strap of Amelia’s pack; the muscles in Amelia’s shoulder twinged with each tug. Amelia paused when she reached the main street. She looked in the direction of Wattle Lodge. A hot breeze pushed down the street, lifting a grey plastic bag into the air.

  ‘What’s your name?’ said the girl.

  ‘Amelia. What’s yours?’

  ‘George. Let’s go.’ She latched on to Amelia’s hand and pulled her ahead. Amelia dragged her feet in big, heavy strides in defiance of the excited tugs. Lucy jumped up and nipped at George’s fingertips, setting her giggling again. Amelia wondered where the girl’s parents were, why she was out here alone.

  She led Amelia behind the supermarket, jumping between wooden pallets. They picked their way up a rocky ridge and met a wall of scrub. ‘Come on, I know the way,’ George said.

  George and Lucy charged ahead through the long grass. Her mother’s voice was there – Watch out for snakes – but Amelia couldn’t bring herself to put fear into the girl.

  Amelia didn’t have the energy to keep up and soon lost sight of them. She walked, slapping at her sticky, itchy legs, until she reached a clearing; a brown creek ran before her, perhaps twenty metres wide, muddy banks stretching up either side. She closed her eyes and listened to the swelling sound of cicadas.

  In the shade of a gum tree, she opened the box from the chemist and pushed the pill out of its blister pack. She placed it on the back of her tongue and swallowed, feeling the journey of the tablet as it wedged at intervals down her dry throat. She chased it with a mouthful of water from her Mount Franklin then held the bottle in her hand, moving her thumb up and down the ridged plastic. Only a few threads of the label remained, faded and scratched.

  When she was staying in the white room, she used to set little traps with her things: the Mount Franklin bottle filled to a certain level, a dead teabag sprawled in the sink just so, the sheets on her bed pulled tight so any pressure on them would show in crinkles. The doorway opened onto carpeted stairs that absorbed her footsteps as she crept up them; she hoped to catch whatever happened in the room when she was absent in action. She’d go around the room, checking each item, as if her mother might disturb something by way of conversation. But each time the room was just how she had left it: the items as they were, awaiting her return.

  There was a splash to her right, and Lucy’s bark carried up from somewhere below. She turned in time to see water recovering around a point of impact; a rope swing skimmed the surface of the creek and swung silently over the bank, its passenger delivered. She watched the murky water, waiting for George to emerge, but the ripples receded into stillness.

  ‘Lucy, come.’ Lucy’s collar tags clinked in response as she made her way to Amelia’s side, stirring a mob of sulphur-crested cockatoos from a bottlebrush tree. There was a flurry and then their urgent, invasive screeches overhead. Shadows of eucalypts played tricks on her and several times she thought she saw the girl’s body moving to the water’s surface. She stepped right up to the edge of the bank; the rope’s passage pointed to George’s white dress, discarded on the shore.

  Lucy barked once, then again, her front paws in the creek. Too much time had passed. At the moment Amelia readied herself to jump into the muddy water – pack on the ground, muscles tensed, heart beating at the base of her throat – George emerged with a spurt, three-quarters of the way to the opposite bank.

  ‘This is the furthest I ever got!’ She was gasping for breath, her voice echoing between the mud banks and walls of trees.

  ‘Pretty far,’ Amelia said. She crouched down, spread her fingers on the dirt for balance and allowed her heartbeat to slow. Three mosquitoes landed in quick succession on her arm; she slapped them off, squashing one of them in a spray of blood and dismemberment.

  ‘Can you do it?’ George called, head bobbing in the water. Amelia stood and wiped the dead insect on her shorts.

  ‘Doubt it,’ she said.

  ‘Jump in!’ George said. She dived below the surface of the water, flashing the orange of her swimming bottoms. Amelia wanted to sit down, to lean against a tree and take a break. Lucy snuffled at some tree roots halfway up the bank; George surfaced and rubbed her eyes. ‘Come on!’

  The kid was so excited; an only child herself, Amelia knew the thrill of finding someone to play with on holiday. At home, Sid was there, an only child too – she remembered how they sneaked into his neighbour’s pool at night, the way they moved silently throu
gh the water. They submerged themselves and tried to find each other in the darkness; she knew the squirm of his slippery, thin limbs, how when she’d come up for air her nostrils filled with the smell of lavender. Sid would be catching his breath, water falling from their faces and pattering into the pool.

  Amelia picked her way along the creek until she reached George’s dress, high up on the bank. She slipped off her shoes, unbuttoned her shorts and let them drop to the dirt.

  Amelia lifted her T-shirt over her head and George called from the water: ‘Woo woo!’

  The little bow at the top of Amelia’s undies seemed somehow too intimate. Her bra was edged with lace, displaying her breasts in a perky, rounded fashion. She crossed her arms over herself. George had made her way over and stood knee-deep in the water a couple of metres from the bank. Her body was flat and rectangular, though Amelia recognised the hint of a curve at each hip. Her own hips had been a surprise to her, discovered by Zach’s hands the day he finished planting her mother’s seedlings in neat rows. After he found them, Amelia stood naked and alone in front of the mirror, running her hands over her chest, her hips. She saw the changes for the first time, her body transformed by the way he touched her, by the things it did to him.

  She would not have been that different from George, and Zach only a bit younger than Amelia was now. The material of the girl’s bikini top was crumpled and empty over the place her breasts would one day grow. No one needed to see the child’s body, not yet. Amelia wished she had a towel in which she could wrap the girl up.

  ‘How old are you?’ Amelia said.

  ‘Eleven and a half.’

  George adjusted the string of her swimming top, stared back at Amelia with blatant inquiry. Amelia dropped her eyes, concentrated on wriggling a bull ant off of her big toe.

  ‘How deep is it?’ Amelia said. She peered over the edge of the bank, gauging her potential course on the rope swing.

  ‘Real deep. I can’t touch, see.’ George swam out again, near to the place where she’d first disappeared beneath the water. She held her hand up straight and sank. She was gone for a few seconds, then reappeared, eyes shut, water falling in a sheet over her face. ‘Didn’t even make it to the bottom. No rocks or anything, promise.’

  The rope hung dormant over the water. Amelia crept down the bank, the mud slimy between her toes. She stretched out at the water’s edge, managing to collect the rope in her fingertips, then gripped the coarse, tight weave in her hand. She walked backwards with it up the bank, careful not to slip, not to falter under George’s gaze. She pulled down on the rope, testing it with her weight. The branch overhead creaked but was solid. She held her hands as high up the twine as she could reach, then launched off the bank, scrambling in midair to place her feet on the scratchy knot at the rope’s end. She swung, squealing despite herself as the rope cut cleanly through thick air, her hair whipping around her face. Her grip slipped and her arms burned from the effort, but the rushing wind, the graze of the rope on her thighs, was so good that she clung on for another flight over the bank.

  On the return journey, she let go of the rope at the highest point of the swing, slapping the water with the side of her body. Her skin tingled from the impact. She relaxed, allowing the momentum of the fall to take her below the surface. The world became quiet and dense; she was aware only of her own body, the clicking of her bones, the release of air from her mouth, the gurgle of her left ear filling up with water.

  Sid had been so excited for her to meet his cousin. He’d told her so much about him but Amelia was unprepared for how big Zach was. His lanky frame filled the doorway and she had to take a step back in order to look up at him. He introduced himself, his voice growly and deep, and she took his extended hand, felt the thickness of his knuckles. His blue eyes were pale and piercing in the sun. A nipple poked out the side of his grey singlet; she knew she shouldn’t look at it, but she couldn’t drag her eyes away.

  She opened her eyes beneath the water, heart too fast. Time for air. She kicked hard upwards; the sun shone down on the water’s brown surface, making it pale like the dregs of a drink once the ice has melted. She reached oxygen just in time, sucking it deep into her lungs.

  Lucy barked from the bank, her tail wagging.

  George clapped. ‘I’m gonna have another go!’ she yelled. She splashed water in two arcs, the droplets sprinkling Amelia’s face and shoulders. George swam to the shore and ran up the bank with fearless agility while Amelia lay on her back, gently kicking her arms and legs, chest heaving. A wasp drifted by her vision; it used one wing like an oar as it tried to save itself from drowning. Water seeped into her other ear. She floated between the buzzing world above and the slow, addictive depths.

  Sid would have loved it there. Up until he left for Melbourne when he was eighteen, he’d gone with her down to the gully at the edge of their suburb, jumped into the cold water then spread out on the sun-warmed rocks. They walked for hours, Sid with his bird book tucked into his back pocket, stopping to listen for the elusive glossy black cockatoo. When they finally saw a pair of them, Amelia didn’t know whether she preferred to look at the red tail feathers of the discovery or to watch the delight on Sid’s face, the way he glowed, hardly blinking.

  ‘Waaahoo!’ George screamed as she swung from the rope again, dropping into the water in a tight bomb. She swam up to Amelia and draped her arms on her, squeezing her legs around Amelia’s waist. ‘Piggyback,’ she said.

  Amelia tried to give her a ride, spluttering in the water as her head kept sinking below the surface. Short of breath, she said, ‘It’s too hard, I can’t touch the bottom.’

  ‘Let’s go again,’ George said, pushing off Amelia with a knee to the back. Amelia returned to lying in the water, eyes closed, the sun flashing over her eyelids as she drifted between the shade of gum trees.

  George’s energy was endless and infectious. Amelia climbed up the bank over and over, addicted to the abandon of swinging out over the water, the letting go of the rope, the falling. Blisters worked their way onto her hands. She collected scrapes and bruises from scrabbling up the rocks out of the water. George scored each of Amelia’s dismounts out of ten and Amelia did the same for her, her applause at George’s creativity travelling down the creek.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ George said after a particularly elaborate somersault and twist. As she caught her breath on the shore, her ribs pressed against her skin, the twitch of her heart visible.

  ‘Me too,’ Amelia said. ‘Wanna share a sandwich?’

  Amelia made her way to shore and dug Brenda’s Tupperware container out of her pack. George settled on a flat rock, her legs dangling into the water, then beckoned Lucy to follow. Amelia sat next to them, pulled off the plastic lid and handed half the sandwich to George.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said. She bit all along an edge of crust, her cheeks bulging. Amelia took a small bite; the chutney was made from red onions and was rich and sweet.

  Lucy searched for crumbs in George’s lap, and she broke off the other crust and gave it to her.

  ‘So, that pill you took,’ George said, displaying the squashed bread in her mouth as she spoke, ‘that must mean that you had sex.’

  Amelia inched forward to the edge of the rock, dipped her toes in the water. ‘Yep.’

  ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘What’s what like?’

  ‘Sex.’ George was fighting off a shy smile. ‘What’s sex like?’

  Amelia took a deep breath, made ripples in the water as she moved her legs in a slow circle. ‘It depends. But you have a long time before you need to think about that.’

  ‘But I want to think about it now.’

  Amelia took another bite of her sandwich, fed Lucy a piece of cheese. She pulled Lucy in close and rested an arm across her back. Something splashed in the water a few metres away; Lucy scanned the area, lifted a paw in readiness.

  ‘So?’ George said. ‘What’s it like? For you?’

  ‘For me?’

 
‘Yeah.’

  The cicadas seemed to grow louder, and as her vision wavered it was as if for a moment the insect vibrations were coming from inside her own head. ‘Well, it’s complicated, I guess.’

  ‘Complicated how? Like, is it good or bad?’

  ‘I guess that depends. It’s best if you feel safe. If you trust the person you’re with. Then it might be good.’

  ‘Hmm …’

  ‘But really, it’s way more fun being a kid. Once you’re an adult and maybe doing those things, you’ll wish you could go back to being a kid.’

  George kicked her legs, made a flurry of white water. ‘Wanna swim again?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ Amelia said.

  They walked barefoot along the main street towards Wattle Lodge. Amelia’s hair released drips down her back and a patch of George’s dress darkened as it grew wet. The air was warm but the sun was beginning to set, surrendering its sting; the town was painted golden. The patterned materials of a sewing shop danced behind glass.

  The swim had lightened Amelia’s steps, loosened something. The tiredness in her body was vivid, in her upper arms and stomach from clenching around the rope; she would sleep well tonight. She imagined a hot shower, then melting onto the mattress at the motel. She’d close the door behind her, just for one night.

  George ran her fingers along buildings as she walked, leaving slimy trails along shopfront windows. She sang to herself, lifting her fingers at certain sounds, sometimes adding a twirl before returning to her path. Her feet slapped against the pavement and the remaining sunshine caught the fine hairs on her brown legs. She spun again, and there was a round stain on the white material of her dress; it had the deep red-black of blood.

  ‘Stop for a sec,’ Amelia said.

  ‘What?’ George said, turning to wait for Amelia to catch up.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘There’s a mark on your dress.’