by Kathryn Hind
George looked down. Lucy sniffed at the girl’s ankles.
‘Sugar,’ George said, holding her dress out to examine the stain. She hitched the material up past her waist, showing the row of blue flowers along the top of her swimmer bottoms. A fat, black leech took its fill, attached to George’s not-yet-there hip. Bright, fresh blood was smeared around it. George smacked at it once, but it didn’t let go. She hopped up and down. ‘What should I do, what should I do?’
‘Calm down. Just stop for a sec!’
George managed to slow herself but couldn’t help flapping her hands around the leech. Beige stripes ran up its ribbed, pulsing body, both alien ends of it suctioned onto George’s skin. Amelia’s own skin crawled; there was every chance they were hanging off her too. As if it were aware of having been discovered, the leech dropped off, hitting the ground without a sound in the eerie way of insects. It wriggled, full and stupid from its meal. Lucy sniffed at it but didn’t go too close. George jumped away and Amelia stepped back, too.
‘You all right?’ Amelia said.
‘Yeah,’ George said. ‘Fine. See ’em all the time.’
The leech continued to wriggle between their two sets of bare feet; Amelia considered squashing it with a stick or a rock, but decided to let it be. George had other ideas; she slipped on her thongs and hovered her foot over the creature before stamping down hard. The leech exploded, and George lost her balance for a moment on the slipperiness of it. The murder scene glittered in the afternoon sunlight.
They continued walking. George was silent after the shock. Amelia searched her own body for invasion, running her hands up and down her legs and arms, willing herself to do so even though if she had one or more on her, she’d prefer them to remain a dirty secret, dropping off when they’d taken what they wanted.
‘Lift up your shirt,’ George said. ‘I’ll check ya.’
Amelia leaned her pack against a pole then held out the material of her T-shirt. George placed her clammy, small hands on her abdomen, gently spinning her around, her face serious while she inspected Amelia. ‘Okay, crouch down.’ Amelia’s knee cracked as she squatted to George’s height. She held Amelia’s wrist, ran her finger over the rubber bands.
‘What are these for?’ George said.
Amelia shrugged. ‘I just like them.’
‘They’re too tight. You should take them off or they’ll cut off your circulation.’ George held her eye and flicked one of the rubber bands. Amelia didn’t flinch.
George continued the search, pulling at the neck of Amelia’s T-shirt and feeling the surface of her back with her palms. ‘All clear,’ she said, her voice full of importance. ‘Now check me.’ She lifted her arms in the air and turned slowly. Amelia looked down her back, checked her armpits and neck; George lifted her dress and Amelia scanned her tummy.
‘I’ve got an outie,’ George said, fingering her bellybutton.
‘Mine’s an innie,’ Amelia said. ‘All clear.’ She pulled George’s dress back down, wished all the protection she could muster over the child and her bright, blind trust.
‘Phew. That thing was a jerk,’ George said.
Amelia hoisted her pack on and they continued down the street, George checking her reflection in the glass of shopfronts, trying to catch a glimpse of the red blotch on her dress, of the blood splattered up her ankles.
By the time they returned, dusk had settled over Wattle Lodge. A man and a woman leaned over a balcony wearing matching singlets and holding a stubby each. Amelia watched them track George as she crossed the car park.
When she was near her door, George dropped to a crouch and gathered Lucy in her arms; she draped herself around her neck, clutching her fur in melodramatic fists. ‘Bye, Lu-Lu,’ she said. Lucy wriggled to get free and George stood, squaring up to Amelia. They stared at each other. George’s skin was lit orange by an overhead lamppost, her limbs stretched long in her shadow. George turned and leapt over a row of bushes.
‘Hey,’ Amelia called out.
George turned, the whites of her eyes glistening.
‘See ya,’ Amelia said. She took a couple of steps towards the girl, lifted her arms in offer of an embrace.
‘Bye,’ George said. She ran, her feet slapping on the cement. She pushed softly into the room, then closed the door on a wedge of light coming from within.
Amelia dropped her arms, shifted the weight of her pack. She watched the window where she had first caught George staring, searched for one last look at her open, freckled face. The curtains remained drawn.
The hiss then crack of a can opening came from above; she looked up and the same man was there. He sipped his drink, nodded to her. She walked beneath the balcony. Once out of view, she unzipped the section of her pack containing her rocket pen, then dug out the postcard George had chosen. The glossy side held the child’s fingerprints, the whorls visible when Amelia held the card up to the light.
Lucy rustled in a nearby garden bed. Amelia sat cross-legged on the ground and wrote Sid’s Melbourne address, resting the postcard on her thigh. The rocket pen struggled and she shook it back to life. Having not planned what she would write, she carefully shaped the characters of their code:
Remember that day we tried to get lost in the gully? We both pretended we didn’t know the way home and then we started to believe it.
She paused, tapped the postcard with the rocket end of the pen. Lucy approached, then stopped in front of her, ears raised, head cocked. Amelia gave her a soft tap on the end of the nose with the pen and Lucy’s tail wagged as she mouthed at Amelia’s wrist.
‘That’s enough,’ Amelia said, patting Lucy’s back down into a sitting position. ‘That’s it, good girl. Good girl.’
Amelia wrote:
I’m thinking of coming to see you.
She looked at the symbols – a circle, a pair of glasses, a tree – that had smudged beneath her wrist. She scribbled the last line out, cutting deep lines into the cardboard, then blocked it out with a long, black rectangle. She signed off with their three stars, missing, wishing, thinking, then:
PS. Happy birthday.
She had to squeeze that part in, the symbols slender and small. There was something else she wished she’d written, but she couldn’t quite find the words. Each time she drew nearer to them, they moved further away, deeper into the clouds of her mind. She pictured Sid’s hands holding the card, his fingerprints mingling with her own, with George’s.
Amelia popped open the buckles of her bag, loosened the drawstring. She pulled out a tin of food for Lucy and sifted through things till she found her bowl. Lucy followed Amelia’s every move as the items were revealed, her eyebrows twitching. The food was chunks of meat in gravy. While Lucy ate, Amelia nibbled the end of a muesli bar, moved oats around her dry mouth.
The lights went off in George’s room across the car park.
The balcony couple had expanded to become some kind of gathering; laughter animated the still night, drifted down to Amelia who lurked below, her back to the wall. She tucked her legs to her chest to make sure she couldn’t be seen.
When Lucy was finished, Amelia cleaned the bowl with some toilet paper from her pack and put the mess in the bin. They walked the footpath around the outskirts of the car park, pausing in front of her room. The green paint of the doorframe was splintered and there were punctures around the handle of the screen door. Someone had left a light on for her inside. She scuffed her feet on the welcome mat, dipped into her pocket for the key.
The door wasn’t locked. She pushed it open. A double bed filled most of the room. Ron and Brenda sat on top of the covers, propped up by pillows.
‘Sorry, I …’ Amelia backed out the doorway, her cheeks burning.
‘No, no, you’re fine. Come on in,’ Brenda said, smiling. She was in a pale green nightie, buttoned up the front, a round neckline revealing her pink, patchy skin. ‘You’ve been gone quite a while. Everything okay?’
‘Yeah, fine thanks.’
Lucy
entered the room between the doorframe and Amelia’s leg. She went to the bed and sniffed at Ron’s bare feet. ‘Oi,’ Amelia said, ‘get out of it.’ Lucy’s ears flattened, her tail sunk between her legs. Ron’s eyes were fixed on the television, light flickering across his face.
Once she saw it, she couldn’t look away: a fold-out mattress was tucked into the narrow space between the television cabinet and the foot of the double bed.
‘It’s certainly not the finest of establishments, but it will do,’ Brenda said. ‘We’re in close quarters tonight. Like camping!’
Amelia stood for too long, her feet pinned to the ground. Ron’s ankles were crossed and beige boxers bunched up around his crotch. His knees protruded in white, bony hills, and at those, she looked away.
‘There’s animal fur everywhere,’ he said. His eyes remained on the television.
Brenda rested her hand on Ron’s. ‘Hopefully you’ll be able to get a good night’s rest, safe and … comfortable,’ Brenda said, smiling sweetly at Amelia.
Amelia nodded, shifted her weight. ‘Thanks.’ The vision of a night to herself evaporated.
She swung her pack to the ground. As she delved in to find her toiletries, she was conscious of each clang and rustle. Ron turned the volume up. She gave in, lifted the whole thing onto her back and edged through the gap between her bed and theirs. Ron craned one way then the other as she blocked the television. Amelia lifted her hand to Lucy, mouthed ‘Stay’. She grabbed the white towel from the end of the fold-out bed and pushed open the bathroom door.
Fumbling up the wall, she found the switch; a light blinked on, accompanied by a loud exhaust fan. The tiles were brown, the sink chipped and cream-coloured. The door had no lock. She rested her pack up against it. She undressed, keeping an eye on the doorhandle, anticipating its twist.
With one foot resting on the bath, she prodded at bruises on her legs, the newer ones giving off small flares of pain, the older ones numb. A bite on the side of her thigh oozed as she squeezed it. There was a scar on her knee, the new skin still sensitive; a chunk of gravel was trapped in it, knobbly beneath her fingertips.
Leaning in close to the mirror, she found new lines on her forehead, around her eyes. Her collarbones were more prominent than she remembered and her shoulders were browned, the skin tight over curved bones. She tried to examine her belly, but the angle was all wrong. She stepped up and balanced on the bath’s slippery edge. She crouched so she could see her stomach and the tops of her thighs in the mirror. Her belly was curved and hard. She pinched with her thumb and index finger and collected a small fold of skin. She tried to turn around to see the cellulite that dimpled the area at the back of her thighs but lost her balance, stepped down onto the warm tiles.
She scratched at the point between her breasts where lace and sweat had made a raised, red rash. Her nipple hardened as her hand brushed it, and she cupped her breast, holding her own eye in the mirror. She pushed her breasts together as she had when she was a child, before there was much to hold, trying to understand what Zach felt beneath his hand when he touched her, how it differed from his girlfriend who was the same age as him. Now, her own touch was hard to bear as she held the weight of each breast in her palms. Her heart was there beneath the barrier of flesh, quickening. She released her grasp, closed her eyes. Stupid girl. It sounded like her mother’s voice. Stupid, stupid girl. She opened her eyes, but could look at the mirror no longer.
In the shower, she scrubbed herself with vigour, softening her skin with water so hot it made her catch her breath. A pink razor rested in the soap dish. She could pop the blade out and make simple, straight lines of pain in her skin. Pain of her own design, with a beginning, and an end; pain that she could see. But George’s little hand was holding her wrist, turning the skin white, and she was saying the bands were too tight. The child was shaking her head, eyes widening in disapproval.
Amelia flicked the bands at her wrist, turned her face away from the razor and into the scalding jet of water.
When she was finished, she stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. She longed to put on her favourite Rage Against the Machine T-shirt, to feel the soft material hanging loose around her body. She yanked it out of the side of her pack. She held it out in front of her, her old friend, curled the seam of it around her finger and pulled it. The material remembered Will, brought him into the bathroom: the smell of his sweat, his ute, his mouth. The betrayal was swift; she bundled the shirt up and shoved it down the side of her bag.
When she stepped out of the bathroom, the room was dark, the television off. A small desk fan creaked from side to side. Light from the car park entered the room and showed the shapes of Ron and Brenda beneath a sheet. Lucy stood from her position by the entrance, her collar tags chiming. Amelia rested her bag against the wall. She crawled over her bed and lay on her stomach, pressed the side of Lucy’s face into her own, then slid between cool, crisp sheets.
There was stirring from the double bed and Brenda sat up. The numbers on the alarm clock gave her face a red glow.
‘Night-night,’ she said.
‘Night,’ Amelia said, pulling the sheet high up to her chin.
Her body twitched, her skin prickling with sweat as she waited for the private sounds of the couple’s sleep to fill the room. Ron’s breaths were long and deep, with a whistle through his nose on the exhale. Brenda’s were quick and shallow, as if she was poised on the verge of being awake, ready for action. Amelia forced herself to breathe in time with the movement of the curtain; inhaling as it pushed out, exhaling as it was sucked back into the open window, dragging its ends along the sill.
Amelia and her mother had slept in close quarters like this when they hiked the Overland Track. They slept in cabins along the way, the two of them amid rows of tired bushwalking bodies laid out on wooden platforms beside, above and across from them. It was just after they found out the cancer had come back, and her mother said the trek would be the last thing she’d tick off her bucket list. Amelia could pick out her mother’s breathing in the rustle and thump and the breathing of strangers. If her mother was too quiet, Amelia reached out and touched her sleeping bag to feel the movement of her chest, to make sure the breaths were still coming.
Ron mumbled something, turned over with a squeak of springs. He sighed back into slumber. Amelia was hot and sticky beneath the sheet. She lifted a leg out, an arm, but her limbs were too close to the double bed, only a few inches between her body and theirs.
Amelia woke during the night and didn’t know where she was. Hours, days and weeks seeped into each other, spinning and slipping around her head. Lucy huffed as she rearranged herself; these shared moments of wakefulness were so common now. Amelia reached out to her, awaited the press of Lucy’s nose into her palm.
She listened for Ron and Brenda, tracked their breathing, but it wasn’t enough. Her sheets were damp and when she kicked them off, Lucy was there, sniffing at her legs. Amelia lifted her pack, tensing her muscles to hold the thing close to her. She stood and walked on the pads of her feet to the side of the double bed, near the door. They lay still, the sheet discarded in a tangle at the bottom of the mattress; Brenda was on her back with her head towards the door, legs open and feet pointing upwards. The fan stirred wisps of hair around her face. The top buttons of her nightgown were open and Ron’s arm was across her, his hand inside the material, resting on the bare skin of her breast.
A train hammered somewhere down the road, setting the walls shaking. Amelia stepped back from the bed and crouched in darkness by the door.
‘What the fuck,’ Ron said, turning over in the bed, still asleep. Amelia thought she saw Brenda’s eyes flutter open and then close again. Their breathing settled. Amelia stepped closer, saw how Ron put a hand behind him, maintaining a point of connectedness with Brenda’s thigh. A musty smell rose from them, their foreheads each carrying a sheen of sweat. Amelia stood, watching, while the seconds flashed by on the alarm clock: 1.13 am. She leaned ove
r them, her eyes following the shapes of their bodies, the impossible peace and stillness of them.
Ron jerked and Amelia stepped away. She patted her leg, and Lucy was at her side. She lifted her pack over one shoulder and pulled open the front door. She thought she heard a whimper from Brenda, perhaps a question, but she pulled on her shoes and walked into the night.
She passed through Crystal Brook, retracing the steps she’d taken with George. Lucy was beside her, looking up for a direction every time Amelia stepped off a kerb, as if unsure of the plan. Amelia reassured her with an occasional touch to the head. A red postbox stood sentry on the main street; Amelia stopped to slip Sid’s postcard through its mouth.
They turned right at a roundabout, following green road signs that indicated the highway. A footpath travelled in front of houses facing off across a wide road. A lull of sleep filled the air. Passing darkened windows, she imagined bodies sprawled across beds, murmurings of dreams, the breath of families mingling in hallways. The street became too small, the homes and dying lawns and potted plants leering at her. She forged ahead, breaking into a run, her chest becoming tight with the effort.
After a rail crossing, houses became more sparse, gardens spreading out into farmland. Amelia stopped, hands on her knees as she caught her breath. Grass rustled nearby, then a thump. The moon was bright, reflecting in the eyes of a group of cows gathered behind a barbed-wire fence. Lucy watched them, raised a front paw.
‘Leave it,’ Amelia said. Lucy held her ground for a moment before approaching Amelia, tail between her legs. ‘That’s it, good girl,’ she said, holding Lucy’s face in her hands; she scratched her ears. ‘That’s a good girl.’ Her voice was foreign; the night was better without it.
A road sign promised a rest stop five kilometres ahead. The white line along the edge of the road faded as she walked, then suddenly grew bold again, as if the line machine had refilled its paint cartridge. Lucy’s wet nose touched her calf. She dragged her hand along the curved cement of the road barrier, feeling the private divot where one section joined another; these secrets of the highway confirmed she wasn’t meant to be there, but the secrets were safe with her.